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” Little Books on the Christian Life 





THE GUESTS OF GOD 
GEORGE JACKSON 












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The Guests of God 


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George Yackson, D.D. 


“HEAR WHAT COMFORTABLE WORDS 
OUR SAVIOUR CHRIST SAITH UNTO 
ALL THAT TRULY TURN TO HIM.” 





New York 
George H. Doran Company 


THE GUESTS OF GOD 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO 


DIDSBURY STUDENTS, PAST AND PRESENT 
A REMINDER OF 
SACRED HOURS SPENT TOGETHER 
IN THE COLLEGE CHAPEL 


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General Preface PD Or wo 


1 ree Christian life 7s a many-sided 

thing, as many-sided as life wtselyf, 
since all life 1s meant to be Chrtstran. 
Tt includes belief and comduct; expert- 
ence and hope, prayer and service; 
church and home and darly task ; the zoy 
of a adwine revelation and the upward 
climb of the loftiest ethic the world has 
ever known. And according to the his- 
tory and environment of each soul who 
tries to live the life are the facets which 
Christianity reveals and the problems 
wt brings to light. These little books 
are wntendead to treat various aspects of 
this many-sided theme in a brief and 
interesting way, in a form pleasant 
to handle and attractive not least to 
younger readers. 


ot 
‘Dh feed 


es 





Note nr wor or om 


THE substance of several of the chapters 
of this little volume was originally spoken 
at the monthly Communion Service of 
Staff and Students in the Didsbury College 
Chapel. 

G. J. 


Dipssury CoLuEGE, 
MaAncHESTER, July 1925. 





Contents or or ar 


I. 
. THE GUESTS AT THE FIRST LORD’S 


“NOT THE LABOUR OF MY HANDS” 


SUPPER . ° 


- THE GUESTS OF GOD . . . 
. THE LOVE OF JESUS . ° ° 
. THE CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP . ° 


THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FELLOW- 


SHIP , : ; s ? 
THE AUSTERITY OF THE CHRISTIAN 
LIFE f : ; : A 
PPATARAXTAC : ; : : 
DOES GOD CARE? : : ° 

. THE BESETTING GOD. : ‘ 
“THINGS PRESENT”  , . : 

. BURDEN OR BRIDGE? . i : 
. LIVING BY THE FAITH OF OTHERS . 
. “DEAD ERE HIS PRIMB”’ : : 


“THE HOVERING ANGEL GIRT WITH 
GOLDEN WINGS” : . 4 


PAGE 


106 
119 
129 
141 
153 


165 





PNOTOURE LABOUR: OF 
MY HANDS” 





I. “ Not the Labour of My Hands”? 


| eae are two ways of thinking 

about the Sacrament of the 
Lord’s Supper, two points of view 
from which we may approach it. We 
may come to it from the Divine side, 
or we may come to it from the human 
side. It may speak to us of the grace 
of the Master, or of the response of 
the disciple. The central thing in it 
may be something that is ours, or 
something that is His; the love we 
feel, or the love we trust. In saying 
this I do not mean to set the two 
things over against one another, as if 
they were mutually exclusive; they 
are not; indeed we never make the 
full meaning of the Sacrament our own 
unless each in its own order and place 
is present. But it must be in its own 
order and place; and the first thing 
in this service is not something that 
we offer to God, it is something that 
He brings to us. As often as ye eat 


3 


The Guests of God 


this bread and drink this cup, ye pro- 
claim—what ? Not our own faith, or 
love, or anything that is ours—ye pro- 
claim the Lord’s death. The accent, 
that is—and half the blunders in 
religion are the blunders of the mis- 
placed accent—is on the Divine deed. 
rather than on the human response. 
The word which in this hour we should 
hear is not our Lord’s searching, 
probing question, Lovest thou Me ?— 
that turns our eyes inward, that 
throws us back upon ourselves ; rather 
it is that other word, Behold what 
manner of love the Father hath bestowed 
upon us—that lifts our eyes outward 
and Godward. And as in the other 
Sacrament that which we declare first 
of all is not the faith or feeling of the 
parents who bring their child for 
baptism, but rather the good will of 
our heavenly Father, the grace and 
authority of Christ, so here, if we 
would ‘‘ take this holy Sacrament to 
our comfort,’ we must give the first 
place not to our thought of God, but 
to His of us; not to the love we feel, 
but to the love we trust. 


4 


** Not the Labour of My Hands ”’ 


I 


This is no mere verbal antithesis. 
The distinction which I have been 
trying to suggest cuts very deep. 
Indeed, in the long run, it involves two 
conceptions of salvation, of religion, 
that are as wide apart as the poles. 
The one finds its centre in man, the 
other in God. The one makes of the 
Gospel good advice, the other good 
news. ‘To the one religion means the 
straining after a high ideal, the 
marshalling of the scattered forces 
of life at the blowing of the trumpets 
of God; salvation is something that 
we win, a wage paid down at the end 
of the day by the just Overseer of life ; 
to the other all is of the Lord’s mercies ; 
salvation is the gift of God in Christ 
Jesus our Lord. Was John Ruskin 
far wrong when he said that “the 
root of almost every schism and heresy 
from which the Christian Church has 
ever suffered has been the effort. of 
man to earn rather than receive his 
salvation’’? Certain it is this is a 
distinction in which the whole evan- 


5 


The Guests of God 


gelical position is at stake. Works 
done in righteousness, which we did 
ourselves—begin at that end, insist on 
these as the first things, and, whether 
they be things ritual or things 
moral, we are back again in the old, 
dreary mill-horse round against which 
Luther’s Reformation and Wesley’s 
Revival were the protest, the pro- 
test of souls that knew themselves 
defrauded of their inheritance in 
Christ. 

I have mentioned Wesley, and by 
way of contrast I may point to two 
little books of his century which no 
one can speak of or handle save with 
gratitude and reverence, and yet 
which enshrine a conception of religion 
very different from his. One is the 
‘Prayers and Meditations” of Dr. 
Johnson. It is a strangely moving 
little book. Can any one read it and 
not be touched to the quick by the 
great, sad sincerity of soul which 
breathes through its every page, and 
at the same time without a sigh of 
regret that there was not some one 
at hand who could have shown to 
Johnson a more excellent way? If 


6 


** Not the Labour of My Hands ”’ 


only Toplady could have taught him 
to sing— 


Nothing in my hand I bring, 
Simply to Thy cross I cling, 


what a difference it might have made! 
Religion would have been a bridge in- 
stead of a burden, something to carry 
him instead of something for him 
to carry. The other book is Law’s 
‘“‘Serious Call.” There again is a book 
to grip and sobera man. “ Law cuts 
to the bone,”’ says Alexander Whyte ; 
““he seizes and holds all the defiles 
and dark passes of the heart.” 
Wesley’s own debt to him, as every 
one knows, was immense. Neverthe- 
less, if Wesley had had no more to 
preach to men than Law’s moonlight 
gospel, there would have been no 
Evangelical Revival. Not by works 
done in righteousness, which we did 
ourselves, but according to His mercy 
He saved us: no other sun has heat 
enough to grow and ripen a world 
harvest such as Wesley gathered. 


The Guests of God 


II 


Not the labour of my hands—is not 
this the constant testimony of the 
saints ? Open the Bible and read: 


Thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol ; 
Neither wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to 
see corruption. 


“Thine holy one” is not a happy 
translation; and the capitals of the 
Authorised Version still further mis- 
lead the reader. The psalmist means 
himself ; the phrase is parallel to the 
“my soul’’ of the previous line; but 
it is better to follow the marginal 
reading of the Revisers and translate, 
“Thy beloved.” Thou wilt not suffer 
him whom Thou lovest to see corruption : 
that rests the psalmist’s confidence 
that death shall not for ever divide 
him from God, not on something in 
himself but on something in God. 
That disciple whom Jesus loved: might 
it not have been, “‘ that disciple who 
loved Jesus”? ? It would have been 
true. But that which brought strength 
and gladness to the disciple’s heart 
was not that his love, however pure 
and deep, went out to Christ, but 
8 


“© Not the Labour of My Hands ”’ 


that Christ’s love, in all its wealth 
and fulness, was poured out upon 
him. Now that ye have come to know 
God, Paul writes to the Galatians, or 
rather, he goes on, checking and cor- 
recting himself, to be known of God 
The self-correction is very significant; 
it seems to reveal the habitual drift 
of all the apostle’s thinking. Religion 
to him was not a discovery, it was a 
revelation; not an achievement, but 
a bestowment. 

And when from the saints of the 
Bible we turn to the saints of the 
Christian centuries, the testimony is 
stillthe same. ‘‘ I think,” said Crom- » 
well, as he lay upon his deathbed, 
“7 think I am the poorest wretch 
that lives; but Ilove God; or rather,” 
like Paul, checking and _ correcting 
himself, ‘‘ I am beloved of God.” 


Not what these hands have done 
Can save this guilty soul ; 

Not what this toiling flesh has borne 
Can make my spirit whole. 


Thy love to me, O God, 
Not mine, O Lord, to Thee, 
Can rid me of this dark unrest, 
And set my spirit free. 


9 





The Guests of God 


Horatius Bonar was a Calvinist; but 
if that is Calvinism, it is Calvinism 
set to a music we all may sing. And 
there are other lines, also from Scot- 
land, which to one man at least have 
meant more than he can ever tell: 


Let me no more my comfort draw 
From my frail hold of Thee ; 

In this alone rejoice with awe, 
Thy mighty grasp of me. 


Again and again I have murmured 
them in the ear of the dying. Once, 
when I quoted them to a dying 
soldier, he asked that he might have 
them in writing. When I saw him 
next they were under his pillow. 
When I buried him they were with 
him in his coffin. 

Charles Wesley taught his people 
to sing: 

I hold Thee with a trembling hand, 
But will not let Thee go ; 


but for once, at least, the Calvinist 

had the better of the Arminian, for 

that which saves is not my trembling 

hold of Him, but His mighty grasp of 

me. And this is the truth to remember 

as we join in this Sacrament. ‘‘ We 
IO 


*“* Not the Labour of My Hands ”’ 


do not presume to come to this Thy 
table, O merciful Lord, trusting in 
our own righteousness, but in Thy 
manifold and great mercies ’’—that 
strikes the note to which all our 
thoughts should be attuned as we 
kneel at the holy Table. 

Is not this the answer, too, to 
timid souls that hold back because, 
they say, they are not worthy? If 
our merit were our right, all the 
places at the Table would be empty 
—all save one. And yet we have 
a right, and herein is our right: not 
that we love Him, but that He loves 
us. We, too, are among the disciples 
whom Jesus loves; and in this Sacra- 
ment, forgetting ourselves and even 
our sins, remembering only Him, let 
us assure ourselves again of a love “‘ so 
amazing that it passes knowledge, 
but so utterly Divine that it must 
be true.”’ 

Alexander Whyte often used to tell 
how once when “ Rabbi’? Duncan 
was passing round the bread and 
wine in a Presbyterian Communion 
Service, he noticed a woman present 
who refused to partake, and how, 

II 


The Guests of God 


leaning along the pew towards her, 
he said in a loud whisper, “‘ Tak’ it, 
woman, tak’ it: it’s for sinners.’’ 


Just as I am, without one plea 
But that Thy blood was shed for me ; 


Just as I am, and waiting not 
To rid my soul of one dark blot; 


Just as I am—Thy love unknown 
Has broken every barrier down— 


O Lamb of God, I come, 


12 


HOB GUESTS AT THE RIRST 
LORD’S SUPPER 





IT. The Guests at the First Lord’s 


Supper an om a wn 


HERE are few subjects concern- 

ing which there is such general 
agreement among Christian people as 
the sacredness and significance of the 
central rite of our holy faith. We 
may interpret its significance in very 
different ways, but, with the exception 
of the Friends, we all bear witness to 
it. And yet, as every minister knows, 
there are in all our congregations— 
at least this is so in England—large 
numbers who very rarely join with 
their fellow-Christians at the Lord’s 
Table. Their absence is due _ to 
various causes. It may be they do 
not quite know where they are in 
matters of religious belief, and their 
doubts extend to some things which 
they suppose to be essential parts of 
the Christian creed; or, perhaps, 
they think they are “ not good enough”’ 
to be reckoned among the declared 


I5 


The Guests of God 


followers of Christ. They feel, and 
rightly, that to partake of the Sacra- 
ment is to commit themselves as they 
are committed by no other act of 
Christian worship; and since they 
doubt their right to make the pro- 
fession which such an act seems to 
involve, they abstain altogether. It 
may be well, therefore, to remind 
ourselves what manner of men they 
were whom Jesus invited to be His 
guests at the first Lord’s Supper in 
the Upper Room at Jerusalem. 


I 


Look at the Twelve. How little 
we know of most of them—of some 
of them only their names. In part, 
of course, this is due to the plan of 
the Gospels. The writers were too 
busy with Jesus to pay much heed 
to the men who stood round Him. 
We have eyes for nobody else when 
we are in the king’s presence. We 
forget the stars when the sun is up. 
But that is not the only explanation. 
Little is told because for the most part 
there was little to tell. God must 

16 


The First Lord’s Supper 


love commonplace people, Abraham 
Lincoln used to say—He made so 
many of them. And such were most 
of the first disciples—plain, simple 
men whose “ Lives’? nobody would 
ever dream of trying to write: what 
would there be to say? One of them 
was a publican, another a revolu- 
tionary, four were fishermen, and all 
of them, apparently, social nobodies. 
Their thoughts about religion—and 
those who stay away from the Sacra- 
ment because their religious opinions 
are unsettled should remember this— 
were as yet vague and unformed ; 
they were vague and unformed even 
concerning Him whom they loved 
and followed. If any one had asked 
them to define their doctrine of “‘ the 
Person of Christ,’’ most of them would 
have had difficulty in understanding 
what was meant; and if the ques- 
tioner had gone on to speak about 
‘the Second Person in the Trinity,” 
Peter might have turned to ask John 
about last night’s “‘catch’’ in order 
to make the conversation intelligible 
again. 

Further, those twelve men in the 

B 17 


The Guests of God 


Upper Room with Jesus—and those 
who stay away from the Sacrament 
because they think they are “not 
good enough” should remember this 
—were obviously very faulty and im- 
perfect. men. The best thing about 
them was their loyalty to their Master, 
and even that failed them when the 
pinch came, and they all forsook Him 
and fled. James and John were 
ready to call down fire from Heaven 
on a Samaritan village that refused 
Him hospitality; and only a week 
before the Crucifixion they were 
scheming with their mother to secure 
the first places in the kingdom. 
Thomas was a man of slow and melan- 
choly mind, always anticipating the 
worst, refusing to be persuaded even 
of good tidings until they were thrust 
upon him so that he could not help 
himself. Peter, whose name stands 
first in all the lists of the Twelve— 
not, of course, because of any such 
‘primacy’? as Roman Catholicism 
has ascribed to him, but because 
qualities like his always bring a man 
to the front among his fellows—is the 
most likeable man in the group; but 
18 


The First Lord’s Supper 


the Evangelists make no attempt to 
paint out the warts in their portrait 
of him. When his blood is up he 
hits out wildly, so that once he came 
near to killing a servant of the high 
priest. When he is excited and angry 
he drops his oaths about like any 
other rough fisherman. And once 
when he had got himself into what we 
call “‘a tight place’’ he did not stick 
at downright lying in order to cut 
himself free. 

Such were the men whom Jesus 
invited to sit down with Him at the 
first Lord’s Supper. 


II 


Why, then, were they there? Why 
had Christ chosen them to be His 
companions? Why was He willing 
to spend such time and care on their 
training? Two reasons may be 
mentioned. 

To begin with, commonplace and 
ordinary, faulty and imperfect, as the 
disciples were, they had the root of 
the matter in them. They were 
ignorant, but they were teachable, 


£9 


The Guests of God 


and, as every teacher knows, one’s 
chance with a scholar depends not so 
much upon what he knows already 
as upon his willingness to learn. And 
in the good and honest hearts of His 
disciples Jesus found the good ground 
in which the seed springeth up and 
beareth fruit, some thirty, some sixty, 
and some a hundredfold. 

But the chief reason why Jesus 
called these men to be with Him and 
to share with Him His last sacra- 
mental meal, why He put into their 
hands the bread and the cup and said 
to them, This do in remembrance of Me, 
was that He knew that in all at least 
save one, He could count on their 
loyalty to Himself. This was the one 
thing that Jesus really cared about. 
Given that, He knew that all else 
would come out right. Dilige et quod 
vis fac—it was St. Augustine’s great 
and daring word—‘‘ Love and do 
what you like.” And Jesus was no 
less bold: Lovest thou Me? He asked, 
and in the disciple’s answer found the 
one thing needful. Always it was 
this that He sought—the loyalty of 
loving hearts; and it was this that 

20 


The First Lord’s Supper 


His disciples brought Him. “~My 
knights,’’ King Arthur said, 


‘‘are sworn to vows 
Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness, 
And uttermost obedience to the king.” 


And in like manner did these men 
bind themselves to Jesus. Through all 
the mists of their misunderstandings, 
through all their fears and failures, 
love for Him shines like a clear and 
steadfast star. Let us also go, said 
Thomas, that we may die with Him. 
He could not understand why Jesus 
must needs go into Judea again; _ this 
only was clear—he had plighted his 
troth to Him, and he could not go 
back. In the darkest hour of Peter’s 
life his Lord had turned and looked 
upon him, and with that look had 
shamed and saved His disciple: he 
went out and wept bitterly. And in 
that swift responsiveness of love to 
love there lay the seed of all true 
Christian doctrine, of all true Christian 
morality. To bind men to Himseli— 
that, I repeat, was Christ’s supreme 
care. Some day, perhaps, His Church 
will be as bold and wise as He, and 
21 


The Guests of God 


will leave all who love Him free to 
think and speak the thing they will. 


Tit 


I have been writing of the disciples 
of the first days, but I have been 
thinking of the disciples of our own 
day, and the application to the subject 
with which we began should be ob- 
vious. Look again at that little apos- 
tolic band: commonplace men with 
commonplace faults, yet of them all 
there was only one who had no right 
in the Upper Room, no right to hold 
the holy cup. Love indeed was on 
the lips of Judas as of the others, but 
poison was in his heart—better for 
him that he had never been born. 
But the rest were in their right place. 
And to-day if any man will come 
after Him and will be His disciple it 
is his right to be there, it is his duty 
to be there. Do we not owe it to 
Him thus to confess Him before men ? 
We do indeed read of one who was 
a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear 
of the Jews, and we Judge no man, but 
we remember another tremendous 


22 


The First Lord’s Supper 


saying: Whosoever shall be ashamed 
of Me and My words— 


‘In memory of My dying love 
Do this !’? He said, and—died. 


Shall we not do it, not because we 
are worthy, but because He bids us ? 


23 





THE GUESTS OF GOD 





III. The Guests of God mw @ 


HE fifteenth Psalm is one of the 
briefest and simplest in the 
whole Psalter. It consists simply of 
a question and its answer. The ques- 
tion may be translated thus: 


Lord, who shall be a guest in Thy tent ? 
Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill ? 


Then, in the clauses that foliow, 
comes the description of him who is 
counted worthy to be the guest of 
God: 


He that walketh uprightly, and worketh right- 
eousness, 

And speaketh truth in his heart. 

He that slandereth not with his tongue, 

Nor doeth evil to his friend, 

Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour. 

In whose eyes a reprobate is despised ; 

But he honoureth them that fear the Lord. 

He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth 
not. 

He that putteth not out his money to usury, 

Nor taketh a bribe against the innocent. 

He that doeth these things shall never be moved. 


27 


The Guests of God 


Such is he who is worthy to be ad- 
mitted to the Divine hospitality, and 
to enjoy the Divine protection. 


I 


It may be said that the Psalmist’s 
answer 1s very partial and inadequate, 
that the morality which it inculcates 
is mainly negative, that not only does 
it lack the inwardness of New Testa- 
ment teaching, it falls short of the 
best ideals even of the Old. There is 
truth in this; yet if any man will take 
the lines of this psalm and apply them 
one by one as tests of his own life, 
perhaps the last thing he will be 
disposed to say of them is that they 
are inadequate. But let that pass. 
The real significance of the psalm lies 
not in its ideal of perfection, but in 
the way in which it clamps together 
the two things which man has so 
often put asunder—religion and 
ethics. For him who slanders with 
his tongue, who wrongs his neigh- 
bour, who condemns the innocent 
for gain, whose word does not bind 
him—for him, says the Psalmist, 

28 


The Guests of God 


there is no place among the guests 
of God. 

Does any one think that that is a. 
very commonplace and obvious thing 
to say? Then let him turn to the 
long history of religion; and whether 
he read it in the Old Testament, or 
in the New Testament, or in the Chris- 
tian centuries, or in his own life, he 
will see that the world has never had, 
and has not yet, any harder lesson to 
learn than this—that a religious man 
must be a good man. “There is no 
strange self-deceit,’’ says Dean Church 
in one of his great sermons, “‘ more 
deeply and obstinately fixed in men’s 
hearts than this: that those whom 
God favours may take liberties that 
others may not; that religious men 
may venture more safely to transgress 
than others; that good men may 
allow themselves to do wrong things.”’ 
It was a self-deceit like this that seems 
to have been the root of most of the 
evils against which the Hebrew 
prophets never tired of protesting. 
Men thought that if only they brought 
their sacrifices, many enough and often 
enough, God would be on their side, 


29 


The Guests of God 


and all would be well; they were 
ready even to bring the fruit of their 
body for the sin of their soul. And 
they are told that God cares for none 
of these things, but only for this— 
that men do justly and love mercy 
and walk humbly with Him. They 
trod the Temple courts, repeating in 
their self-complacency, The temple of 
the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the 
temple of the Lord, are these, while all 
the time they oppressed the stranger, 
the fatherless, and the widow, and 
were guilty of theft and murder and 
adultery. And again they are told, 
Behold, ye trust in lying words that 
cannot profit; one thing only can put 
them right with God—amend your 
ways and your doings. Isaiah puts 
it all in one stinging epigram: iniquity 
and the solemn meeting—wickedness 
-and worship—that unblessed union 
that man has so often managed to 
bring about, God cannot away with. 
And while some have sought to find 
in ritualism a substitute for righteous- 
ness, others have sought it in a fer- 
vent emotionalism, or in orthodoxy of 
belief. But again, and always, the 


30 


The Guests of God 


answer is the same. When Matthew 
Arnold said that “‘a company of 
Cornish revivalists will have no 
difficulty in tasting, seeing, hearing, 
and feeling God twenty times over to- 
night, and yet may be none the better 
for it to-morrow morning,” he was a 
good deal less than fair to the religion 
of Cornwall; nevertheless, his finger 
was on the standing peril of all “ re- 
vivalism ’’—the thinness and poverty 
of its ethical life. And as for ortho- 
doxy of belief, was not “ Rabbi” 
Duncan right when he said that there 
is only one heresy, and that is Anti- 
nomianism ? Think what we may of 
Pope’s famous couplet about “‘ modes 
of faith,” it is surely true, his can’t 
be right whose life is in the wrong. 
Circumcision is nothing and uncircum- 
cision is nothing—ritualism is nothing, 
and orthodoxy is nothing—but the 
keeping of the commandments of God. 


II 


Lord, who shall be a guest in Thy tent ? 
Who shall dwell in Thy holy hill ? 


When can the old question be more 
31 


The Guests of God 


fittingly asked and pondered than 
when we are preparing our hearts to 
receive the Holy Communion? It is 
when we sit at the Lord’s Table that 
we have most need to remind ourselves 
what manner of men His guests must 
be. True, at that Table, the guest’s 
first thought should be not of himself, 
nor of anything that is his, not even 
of his own unworthiness, but of the 
grace of the Host who has bidden 
him come. Not by works done im 
righteousness, which we did ourselves, 
but according to His mercy He saved us 
—that is our hope, that is our warrant ; 
but for that we never dare have come 
at all. But though that is the first 
word, it is not the last. There are 
other words which the Lord of the 
Table speaks to His guests, words 
that search and sift us the more because 
they are spoken there and then: Ye 
call Me Master and Lord: and ye say 
well; forsolam. If I then, the Lord 
and the Master, have washed your feet, 
ye also ought to wash one another's feet. 
For I have given you an example, that 
ye also should do as I have done to you. 
A new commandment I give unto you, 


32 


The Guests of God 


that ye love one another ; even as I have 
loved you, that ye love one another. 
These are the commands of love, and 
they are not less but more exacting 
than the commands of law. We may 
come to the Table and never hear 
them; we may leave it and forget 
them, but the instructed Christian 
conscience has the law of the guest- 
chamber always before it. This, for 
example, is how Thomas a Kempis 
writes of ‘‘Self-examination before 
Communion ”’: 


Above all things, thou oughtest to receive 
this sacrament with great humility of heart, 
and lowly reverence. 

And, if thou hast time, confess unto God in 
the secret of thine heart all the miseries of thy 
disordered passions. 

Lament and grieve, that thou are yet so 
carnal, so worldly, so unmortified as to thy 
passions ; 

So unwatchful over thy outward senses, so 
often entangled with vain imaginations ; 

So quickly distracted, so seldom wholly 
recollected ; 

So suddenly moved to anger, so apt to take 
displeasure against another, and speak evil of 
others ; 

So prone to judge ; 


c 33 


The Guests of God 


So often purposing much good, and yet 
performing little. 

These and other thy defects, being confessed, 
with full resignation and with thy whole will, 
offer up thyself a perpetual sacrifice to the 
honour of My name on the altar of thy heart, 
faithfully committing thy body and soul unto 
Me ; 

That so thou mayest receive profitably the 
Sacrament of My body. 


Then, after this grave, sweet, clear 
voice out of the Middle Ages, let us 
turn to ‘The Order of the Adminis- 
tration of the Lord’s Supper’”’ in the 
Book of Common Prayer. Here is 
an extract from the Exhortation to 
be read when ‘the minister giveth 
warning for the celebration of the 
Holy Communion”: “If any of you 
be a blasphemer of God, a hinderer or 
slanderer of His word, an adulterer, 
or be in malice, or envy, or in any 
other grievous crime, repent you of 
your sins, or else come not to that 
holy Table; lest after the taking of 
that holy Sacrament, the devil enter 
into you, as he entered into Judas, 
and fill you full of all iniquities, and 
bring you to destruction, both of body 
and soul.’”? Then, when the Com- 


34 


The Guests of God 


munion is about to be received, the 
invitation to partake is to them that 
do truly and earnestly repent of their 
sins and are in love and charity with 
their neighbours, and intend to lead a 
new life, following the commandments 
of God, and walking from henceforth 
in His holy ways; after which follows 
the General Confession. Most signi- 
ficant of all, perhaps, is the place 
given to the Ten Commandments in 
the very forefront of the whole service. 
Many, naturally, prefer to use the 
higher, Christian law of the Beati- 
tudes, but, whichever be used, the 
essential significance is the same: the 
guests of God are subject to the law 
of God. Here in the central rite of 
our holy faith, in the very act in which 
we declare the wonder of the Divine 
grace, there is laid upon us anew the 
obligation to do justly, to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with our God. 
Religion and right doing are not two 
things, they are one thing: it is the 
word of the Lord Himself to all who 
sit with Him at His Table. 


35 





THE LOVE OF JESUS 





IV. The Love of feus we@ 


ENRY DRUMMOND has told of 

a young girl whose perfect 

grace of character was the wonder of 
those who knew her. She wore on 
her neck a gold locket which no one 
was ever allowed to open. One day, 
in a moment of unusual confidence, 
one of her companions was allowed 
to touch its spring and learn its secret. 
She saw written these words: Whom 
having not seen I love. That was the 
secret of her beautiful life. And that 
has always been the Christian secret. 
The spring of all that is purest and 
best in the long Christian story 1s 
there. This is true both of the in- 
dividual Christian and of the Christian 
community. Whatever there is in 
the past to make us proud of the 
Christian name—alas that there should 
be so many things which only make 
us hang our heads in sadness and 
in shame !—all finds its explanation 


39 


The Guests of God 


here: the love of Christ constraineth 
US. 

This is, of course, both very familiar 
and very sacred, which makes a double 
difficulty for any one who would say 
anything about it: 

this 
Nor tongue nor pen can show. 
Yet it is always good to think on these 
unspeakable things, and sometimes 
even to try to find speech for them, 
however far short all our words must 
come. 


I 


Once more let us remind ourselves 
that, as Dr. Denney was never tired 
of telling us, Christ is the whole of 
Christianity ; He is the whole of it 
on the Divine side, as the right attitude 
to Him is the whole of it on the human 
side. We say sometimes of a man 
who has mastered a subject through 
and through that he knows it ‘‘ from 
A to Z.” In the New Testament 
Jesus is called ‘“ Alpha and Omega.” 
But “Alpha and Omega” are, of 
course, only Greek for A and Z. So 


40 


The Love of fesus 


that to know Christ is to know all 
that Christianity means; at least it 
is to leave out nothing that is essential. 
Or, to say the same thing in another 
way, Christianity means, first and 
last, love to a person. When I invite 
a man to become a Christian, I am 
not asking him to put his name at the 
foot of a creed, to conform to a par- 
ticular mode of worship, to espouse 
a cause or to work for an ideal. These 
things may all come later, but they 
are not the first things. To be a 
Christian means—you cannot put it 
too simply to put it truly—to give 
oneself in love and loyalty to Jesus. 
Are not the master-forces of life 
always personal? Let a man look 
back over his own life and he will see 
that, whether for good or for ill, he 
owes most not to principles or ideas 
but to somebody. “Ideas,” says 
George Eliot, ‘“ are often poor ghosts ; 
our sun-filled eyes cannot discern 
them; they pass athwart us in their 
vapour, and cannot make themselves 
felt. But sometimes they are made 
flesh; they breathe upon us with 
warm breath, they touch us with soft, 


AI 


The Guests of God 


responsive hands, they look at us 
with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to 
us in appealing tones; they are 
clothed in a living human soul, with 
all its conflicts, its faith and its love. 
Then their presence is a power, then 
they shake us like a passion, and we 
are drawn after them with gentle 
compulsion, as flame is drawn to 
flame.” Our literature is full of the 
same great truth. There is, says 
Tennyson, 


no more subtle master under heaven 
Not only to keep down the base in man, 
But teach high thought, and amiable words, 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
And love of truth, and all that makes a man— 


¢ 


there is no more ‘‘ subtle master’ to 
do all that, says Tennyson, 


‘Than is the maiden passion for a maid. 


But that will do it when all the good 
counsels of the moralist avail nothing 
—poor, wingless things that fall to 
the ground unheeded. 

Among the many disciples of 
Mazzini who laid down their lives that 
Italy might be one and might be free, 


42 


The Love of Fesus 


one of the earliest and the most 
beloved was Jacopo Ruffini; and an 
English poetess has told in simple, 
moving lines what nerved him to the 
sacrifice : 


O Giuseppe, this shall be my flower, 
That I died first for thee! No other soul 
Shall come before me to that unlit goal, 

Or take pre-eminence of me of this hour ! 

And this shall be my crown through all the days 
Hereafter, when men speak of thee thy due, 
And speak thy name, they will speak my 


name too, 
And say, “ Mazzini loved him’; nay, their 
praise 


Shall yet reach higher, saying all the truth, 
‘* Better than all the world besides, in youth, 
Mazzini loved him.” That remembrance 

holds 

My name in lustre of thy name, and folds 

My spirit in a happy mist of sleep ; 
And not for ever lonely I lie down ; 

For me too in their hearts shall all men keep 
For thy sake,—so shall I have love for crown. 


Stronger than all other ties, stronger 
even than the love of freedom or of 
Italy, was the love which bound 
Ruffini to his master. And the whole 
philosophy of the Christian life lies 
there: whom having not seen we love. 


43 


The Guests of God 


II 


Let us watch how that great idea 
has worked in Christian history. 
Always the mainspring of Christian 
life and service has been devotion to 
Jesus; it is at that source the lamp 
has been fed. 

(1) We go back to the first days: 
He appointed twelve, that they might be 
with Him—it was so that the Christian 
Church began. The bond of union 
was the tie with Jesus. It not only 
kept the disciples together, it deter- 
mined everything. When they could 
be sure of nothing else, this at least 
was clear—nothing must separate 
them from their Lord. Jf I must die 
with Thee, said Peter, I will not deny 
Thee; and though, as we know, his 
faith failed, Peter meant what he 
said—meant it with all the passion of 
his soul. Let us also go, said Thomas, 
that we may die with Him. And the 
two spoke for the twelve: as they 
followed, on that last sad journey to 
Jerusalem, they were afraid; but they 
followed. This was the one thing 
that Jesus seems to have cared about. 


44 


The Love of Fesus 


Follow Me, He said; come unto Me; 
and when to His question, Lovest thou 
Me? a disciple could answer, Lord, 
Thou knowest that I love Thee, on him 
Jesus was ready to lay all manner of 
service. 

(2) And as it was in the beginning 
so has it been through the centuries. 
The friends of Jesus have often 
quarrelled among themselves, but in 
a very real sense they have always 
been one in Him. Listen to Polycarp 
in the second century: “Swear,” 
said his Roman judge, “‘and I will 
set thee at liberty; renounce the 
Christ.’ ‘‘ Eighty and six years have 
T served Him,” said the old man, “ and 
He never did me any wrong; how 
then can I blaspheme my King, my 
Saviour?’? Listen to Thomas a 
Kempis in the fifteenth century : 


What can the world profit thee without 
Jesus ? 

To be without Jesus is a grievous hell; and 
to be with Jesus a sweet paradise. 

If Jesus be with thee no enemy shall be able 
to hurt thee. 

He that findeth Jesus findeth a good treasure, 
yea, a good above all good. 


A5 


The Guests of God 


And he that loseth Jesus loseth overmuch, 
yea, more than the whole world. 

Most poor is he who liveth without Jesus ; 
and he most rich who is dear to Jesus. 


Listen to the witness of the Christian 
hymn-book—almost any one will do: 


J esu, the very thought of Thee 
With sweetness fills my breast. 


That is no voice crying in the wilder- 
ness. A hymn-book implies a con- 
gregation; and this congregation is 
ten thousand times ten thousand and 
thousands of thousands; and Christ is 
all their song. 

(3) It is easier, perhaps, in a matter 
of this kind to speak of other days 
than of our own, and of other men 
than of ourselves; nevertheless, what 
has been said of the past is true also 
of the present. There is a story of 
some simple, devout villager standing 
in one of our art galleries, before a 
moving representation of the Passion 
of our Lord, and, oblivious of every- 
thing save of the love of the Lord 
who bought him, murmuring aloud, 
‘Bless Him! I love Him.” Well, 
that is not the way of most of us, we 


46 


The Love of Fesus 


keep a tighter hold upon ourselves ; 
and yet that is what we too would 
wish to show if not to say—we love 
Him. 

It was my duty and privilege some 
time ago to go through the private 
papers and letters of one who had 
been distinguished among his fellows 
for the strength and ardour of his 
devotion to the cause of the poor. I 
had known him for many years; I 
knew something of his glowing zeal, 
his tireless ingenuity in doing good; 
yet I was hardly prepared for the 
passion which, like a sacred fire, still 
shone in those old, dead records. 
What was it that fed the ever-burning 
flame? What was it that held him 
to the task through the long and 
difficult years? There is only one 
answer—whom having not seen he 
loved. He had known in his own 
heart the love that would not let him 
go, and his life was his response. 


47 





THE CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 





V. The Christian Fellowship or 


i ELLOWSHIP”’ is one of the 

great words of the New ‘Testa- 
ment, as it is also one of the great 
facts of Christian history. We use it 
in another form—Communion—as one 
of the names for the central rite of our 
faith. And, again, in the familiar word 
of benediction, the fellowship of the Holy 
Spirit is conjoined with the grace of 
Christ and the love of God. What 
does the phrase signify ? Not “fellow- 
ship with the Holy Spirit’’; that is 
an idea quite foreign to the New 
Testament; rather it is “‘ fellowship 
brought about by the Holy Spirit.” 
As Professor E. F. Scott puts it, in 
his recent book “‘ The Spirit in the New 
Testament,” ‘“‘ the Apostle desires for 
his converts that their relations should 
be right with God, with Christ, and 
with one another.’”’ We have used 
the verse as a proof-text of Trinitarian 
doctrine; but whatever implications 


51 


The Guests of God 


the words may carry with them, it 
was not of “the inner constitution of 
the Divine nature’’ that the Apostle 
was thinking, but of something much 
simpler. It is as if he had said, * May 
you possess the grace of Christ, and 
the love of God will then be yours, 
and you will be united with one 
another through the Spirit.” 

There are, then, two sides to the 
Christian fellowship: fellowship with 
Christ and fellowship with one another. 


I 


He appointed twelve, that they might 
be with Him: that is how the Christian 
society began. Whatever the Church 
has come to be, and however we may 
define it, it was at the first simply a 
fellowship of the friends of Jesus, and 
the essential thing in the life of the 
Church is always missing except in 
so far as that initial experience is 
repeated in the lives of men to-day. 
The fellowship is His creation—He 
appointed the twelve—and the burden 
of its maintenance is upon Him. If, 
to borrow an illustration of Dr. D. 8. 


52 


The Christian Fellowship 


Cairns, by letter of introduction, or 
in some other way, I seek to enter the 
circle of a great man’s friendships, 
that is one thing; but if he himself 
takes the first step and invites me into 
it, that is another and a very different 
thing. And the Christian’s fellowship 
with Christ is begun by His act, and 
from His side: Ye did not choose Me, 
but I chose you. The words might 
be read as an implied reproach, as if 
on our side there were something 
lacking that might and should have 
been there. But rightly understood 
they are the ground of all our hope. 
If the burden of the fellowship were 
upon us, if we were responsible for 
initiating and maintaining it, we know 
that we could make no headway in it. 
But since He makes the task His own 
—and that is the very meaning of the 
‘‘ srace ’’ of which the New Testament 
is so full—since He chooses and calls 
and appoints, we may dare to hope 
that some fruits of the fellowship will 
be ours. 

He appointed twelve, that they might 
be with Him: let us go back to the 
beginning and see how some of those 


93 


The Guests of God 


who first entered that fellowship came 
at last to think of it. Once Jesus 
said to His disciples, Let ws go into 
Judea again. Rabbi, they answered, 
ihe Jews were but now seeking to stone 
Thee; and goest Thou thither again ? 
But He saw a hand they could not 
see; nevertheless, He said, let us go. 
Thomas, therefore, said unto his fellow- 
discvples, Let us also go, that we may 
die with Him. It is easy to see what 
was in the disciple’s mind: if this is 
the way the Master must go, Thomas 
will tread it too. To go may mean 
to die, but at least it will be to die 
with Him; and though Thomas is 
sure of nothing else, of this he is very 
sure—that nothing must separate him 
from his Lord ; better death with Him 
than life without Him. And so the 
die is cast: Let ws also go. Then, 
presently, they came to realise that 
Christ’s fellowship with men is a 
thing over which even death itself 
has no power. Jesus, of course, knew 
it all along. On the Cross He took 
the nailed hands of the robber into 
His own: To-day shalt thou be with 
Me in Paradise; and the fellowship 


54 


The Christian Fellowship 


begun in the night of Calvary lives 
on still in heaven’s eternal day. 
When He took last leave of His 
disciples it was with no sadness of 
farewell: Lo, I am with you always, 
He said. It is the same great word 
that was upon His lips at the first: 
with Him—with you. For this fellow- 
ship into which He had called them 
was not tied to the lake-shore, or to 
the Galilean hills; it belonged not to 
the passing years, but to the timeless 
and eternal things. So He thought 
of it, and so they came to think of it 
too; as the fellowship had outlived 
His death, so it would outlive theirs ; 
and when they yielded up to death 
their dear ones, or thought of their 
own last hour, this was the faith which 
lit for them the darkness of the grave : 
So shall we be ever with the Lord—with 
Him still. 

And besides all this the fellowship 
had fruits which all the world might 
see and judge of. Whenever Jesus 
and men came together, things began 
to happen: old things passed away, 
wrong things were put right, all things 
became new. This is how one writes 


aye) 


The Guests of God 


of the fellowship who was himself one 
of the first to enter it: Our fellowship 
is with the Father, and with His Son 
Jesus Christ; but, he continues, if 
we say that we have fellowship with 
Him, and walk in the darkness, we lhe, 
and do not the truth. Nor was this a 
solitary example; it was always so 
that the fellowship worked. Jesus 
called a publican into it, and straight- 
way the thought of right and wrong, 
of duty to others, was charged with 
a new meaning. Henceforth, he 
said—and said it without any urging 
from without, as the natural first- 
fruits of his own new experience— 
half of his goods he would give to the 
poor, and where he had wronged any 
man he would make restitution four- 
fold. Even the hostile outsider could 
not wholly shut his eyes to what was 
happening: When they beheld the 
boldness of Peter and John, they took 
knowledge of them, that they had been 
with Jesus. ‘Their enemies themselves 
being witness, the fellowship worked ; 
and the men whom Christ called to be 
with Him grew in the end to be like 
Him, and to remind others of Him. 


56 


The Christian Fellowship 


II 


The Christian fellowship has another 
side: it includes both our fellowship 
with Christ and our fellowship with 
one another. And here, too, the New 
Testament is equally explicit. All 
that believed were together: this is the 
note struck at the very beginning of 
the Apostolic Age; and when we 
turn to the letters of St. Paul we find 
them sprinkled throughout with nouns 
and verbs compounded with the Greek 
preposition which means “with.” 
Fellow-worker, fellow-prisoner, fellow- 
servant, fellow-traveller, fellow-heir— 
these are some of the names, as Dr. 
Glover says, which Paul uses for his 
friends. The Christian fellowship is 
a fellowship of service in which each 
has his part to fill and his work to do. 
I long to see you, the Apostle writes 
to the Christians at Rome, that I may 
impart unto you some spiritual gift; 
that is, he goes on, checking and 
correcting himself, that I with you may 
be comforted in you, each of us by the 
other’s faith, both yours and mine; as 


57 


The Guests of God 


if he would remind them that the very 
essence of their relation lies in its 
mutual character. 

Again, the Christian fellowship is a 
fellowship of suffering. Endure hard- 
ness, Paul writes to Timothy, as a good 
soldier of Christ Jesus. The word he 
uses is one of those compound verbs 
which are not easy to translate. The 
Authorised Version misses its signi- 
ficance altogether; the Revised reads, 
Suffer hardship with me; but perhaps 
the true meaning is wider still, as if 
the Apostle had said, ‘‘ Life is full of 
hardship; take your share.” “No 
deliberate seeking of a sheltered life,” 
says Dr. Denney, “is truly Christian.” 
For some of us, perhaps, it is a hard 
saying that may well make us uneasy ; 
yet when we open the New Testament, 
or sit down at the Holy Table and 
think of what is meant by the broken 
bread and the poured-out wine, who 
dare deny its truth ? 

And beyond these obvious things 
there are implications in the Christian 
fellowship which are only just begin- 
ning to dawn upon us. That ye may 
be strong to apprehend with all the 


58 


The Christian Fellowship 


saints—is there not an understanding 
of the truth of God which is impossible 
to us in the isolation of our sectarian 
and national life? As our mission- 
aries have long since told us, there are 
aspects of our own gospel which we 
shall never fully understand, until 
they are expounded to us by the 
saints of Africa or India or China. 
** Christians,’ says Bunyan, in one of 
his earlier and less-known books, ‘‘ are 
like the several flowers in a garden, 
that have upon each of them the dew 
of heaven, which, being shaked with 
the wind, they let fall their dew 
at each other’s roots, whereby they 
are jointly nourished, and become 
nourishers of each other.’? And there 
are flowers in the garden of our English 
Christianity that will never put on 
their fairest hues until they have 
been watered and nourished by other 
hands than our own. 

And further yet this fellowship 
extends. “We also bless Thy holy 
Name for all Thy servants departed 
this life in Thy faith and fear’’: the 
words stand as part of the prayer “‘ for 
the whole state of Christ’s Church 


59 f ‘ 


The Guests of God 


militant here on earth,”’ in the Com- 
munion Service of the Church of 
England. 


One family we dwell in Him, 
One Church, above, beneath. 


Into this wide fellowship, a fellow- 
ship not of earth only, but of heaven, 
are we come, unto Mount Zion, and 
unto the city of the living God, the 
heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable 
hosts of angels, to the general assembly 
and church of the firstborn who are 
enrolled in heaven, and to the spirits of 
just men made perfect. Let us pray 
to be kept loyal to the generation of 
God’s children. 


LiL ESPON S FRILETY* OF 
FELLOWSHIP 


y 
4) 


We 
‘i ‘ 





VI. The Responsibility of Fellowship 


OMETHING was said in the 
previous chapter about the 
Christian fellowship—our fellowship 
with Christ, and our fellowship with 
one another. And this fellowship is 
one of the chief of our Christian 
privileges. But in  God’s | sight 
privilege and responsibility are but 
opposite sides of the same fact, no 
more to be separated than are the 
opposite sides of the same coin. In 
this chapter, therefore, something may 
be said about the responsibility of 
fellowship. 


I 


It is written of one of the kings of 
ancient Judah, Joash did that which 
was right in the eyes of the Lord all the 
days of Jehoiada the priest, the im- 
plication being, apparently, that it 
was Jehoiada’s influence that kept 

03 


The Guests of God 


the young king right. Afterwards, 
when Jehoiada was dead, Joash gave 
ear to other counsellors, with the 
result that both he and they forsook 
the house of the Lord, the God of their 
fathers, and served the Ashervm and the 
idols; but so long as Jehoiada was 
there all went well—Joash did that 
which was right in the eyes of the Lord. 
And that is the kind of service, the 
service which Jehoiada did to Joash, 
that we all owe one to another. 

There is nothing in our Christian 
birthright which is more precious than 
the moral tradition—the sense that 
duty is right, that it is the only thing 
-—which the past has created for us. 
It is a tradition which every man does 
something to strengthen or to weaken, 
to energise or to paralyse, and the 
obligation to see to it that, whether 
by inspiration or restraint, we make 
it easier for others to do right and 
harder to do wrong is one from which 
none can escape. About the middle 
of the fifteenth century Constanti- 
nople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who 
have held it ever since. For long it 
was the fashion—under Gibbon’s 

64 


The Responsibility of Fellowship 


powerful influence—to sneer at the 
ancient Christian empire which for a 
thousand years before that great 
disaster had its seat in Constantinople. 
The Byzantine, we were told, was 
profoundly theological and profoundly 
vile. But later historians have passed 
a different judgment, for this if for 
no other reason, that through those 
long years the Empire was the solitary 
breakwater that held back the mount- 
ing tide of Asiatic barbarism. When 
at last it yielded, the young nations 
of the West had grown strong enough 
to protect themselves. If it had 
yielded sooner, all Europe might have 
been whelmed in night and water. 
The illustration is a trifle grandiose 
for the simple thing I am trying to 
say; but what for a thousand years 
Constantinople did for Western 
Kurope, what, so long as he lived, 
Jehoiada did for Joash, is what, 
according to the measure of our power 
and opportunity, we have all to do— 
to build the breakwater behind which, 
when the storm bursts, another may 
find shelter. Or, to change the figure 
for one borrowed from a well-known 


E 65 


The Guests of God 


chapter in George Adam Smith’s 
“Isaiah,” just as sometimes a huge 
boulder will arrest the death-dealing 
drift of the desert sand, and in its 
shelter verdure and beauty will spring 
up, so again and again in human life 
forces deadlier than the desert drift 
have been stayed by some strong, 
heroic soul, in whose sheltering shadow 
other lives have found their chance ; 
a man has been as a hiding-place from 
the wind, and a covert from the tempest, 
as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land. Such was Jehoiada to Joash, 
and such God means that we should 
be to one another. 


stp 


We ourselves are all debtors to 
some Jehoiada; we are all better 
men and women than we should have 
been but for the silent pressure of 
unseen hands, the steadying influence 
of that moral tradition that others 
have made for us; and what we have 
received we owe. Does it need to be 
said that the debt cannot be paid in 
words? The last man to help us 


66 


The Responsibility of Fellowship 


here is the religious busybody with 
his liberal doses of what the schoolboy 
calls “pi.” When Jehoiada “tries 
it on” after that fashion, nothing 
happens except that Joash wants to 
kick him. The one thing here that 
avails, that has “‘ power on this dead 
world to make it live,” is a religion 
that cannot be told or taught—it 
must be caught. We may teach 
theology, or the Bible, or criticism, 
but not religion; that is learned, if 
it is learned at all, when we are teach- 
ing something else; and generally, 
perhaps, it is “‘caught’”’ most readily 
from those who least know they are 
giving it. Nevertheless, the debt 
remains, not payable in the currency 
of speech, but there, and to be paid, 
a due to all men and especially to 
them that are of the household of the 
faith. 

Let us go back to the first Christian 
fellowship—the origin and pattern of 
all ours—the fellowship of Jesus and 
the Twelve. Nothing in the records 
of our Lord is more instructive than 
those which show how He wrought 
on the men who were daily with Him, 


67 


The Guests of God 


and especially on Peter. On him, 
more fiercely perhaps than on any of 
his companions, life’s pitiless drift 
beat down. But between it and him 
Jesus put Himself—Himself and His 
prayers, a rock to resist the drift: J 
have prayed for thee, He said, that thy 
faith fail not. And though, as we 
know, Peter fell, yet—as Dr. Rendel 
Harris quaintly puts it—“he fell 
softly, because he fell on that prayer.”’ 
For what tempted soul is any prayer 
of ours a sheltering arm? Or do we 
wince as we read the ancient prophet’s 
word: God forbid that I should sin 
against the Lord in ceasing to pray for 
you? Not less admonitory is the 
story of Judas. Need there have 
been a traitor among the Twelve? 
We are sure that nothing was wanting 
on Christ’s side; we are sure that 
He who prayed for Peter prayed also 
for Judas. But what of the other 
disciples? Had they done all that 
they might to save him? When the 
news was whispered that Judas had 
made away with himself, did none of 
them feel that some drop of his blood 
was upon their heads? It may seem 
68 


The Responsibility of Fellowship 


fanciful even to ask the question, yet 
when one reads the story of the filling 
up of the place in this ministry and 
apostleship from which Judas fell away, 
it is not easy to avoid it. Would 
this have been the end—so Peter may 
have put it to himself—if only he 
and James and John and the rest of 
them had done what they might? 
And was it that that put the bit into 
Peter’s mouth, and made his words 
so strangely few and quiet, that, 
leaving all judgment to Another, he 
will say of the dead traitor only this 
—that he had gone to his own place ? 
We do not know, but we cannot too 
often remind ourselves that we are 
debtors, that the best are responsible 
for the worst, that we are our brother’s 
keeper, and that when one in our 
home, or our “set,’? or our church, 
goes astray, the blame is generally 
ours as well as his. How often is it 
that when Joash fails, Jehoiada has 
failed first ! 

In these simple moral common- 
places lies the tragedy of more lives 
than one cares to think of; yet it is 
idle to ignore them. God has set us 


69 


The Guests of God 


in families, in communities, in fellow- 
ships of many and varied kinds, and 
it is through them that many of life’s 
best gifts are made our own; but to 
receive them while yet we refuse the 
responsibility that goes along with 
them is to turn privilege into penalty. 
Even to ask, “Am I my brother’s 
keeper ?’’. is treason against the 
fellowship by which we live. And 
nowhere does such treason wear a 
baser look than within the fellowship 
that we call the Christian Church. 
Yet how inadequately are its responsi- 
bilities realised! The perfecting of the 
saints, the work of ministering, the 
building up of the body of Christ—how 
little do the things for which these 
old words stand count in the mind of 
the average Christian to-day ! 

How to discharge our debt to the 
fellowships in which we live is too 
large a subject for a final paragraph. 
One thing only need now be said. 
Every preacher knows how much in 
a service depends on something that 
we call “‘atmosphere.” It is difficult 
to define; but we know when it is 
there; still more do we know when it 


70 


The Responsibility of Fellowship 


is not there. With it, anything may 
happen; without it, nothing happens. 
It is like that in the life of the home, 
the school, the college, the office, the 
workshop; always it is “‘ atmosphere”’ 
that matters most. And “atmo- 
sphere’’ is something that every one 
helps to make or mar.! The best 
safeguard against sickness is what a 
physician calls “‘ tone”; and “tone” 
has its counterpart in the life of the 
community. He who cares most for 
that will best help Joash to do that 
which is right in the eyes of the Lord. 

1 «There is a sort of moral climate in a household, 
an impalpable, unseizable, indefinable set of influ- 
ences, which predispose the inmates to industry and 


self-control, or else relax fibre and slacken purpose.” 
(Morley’s Voltaire.) 


71 





THE AUSTERITY OF THE 
CHRISTIAN LIFE 





VII. The eae of the Danser 
Lif é ste a) 


NE of the most arresting words 

in the New Testament concern- 

ing the Lord’s Supper is in St. Paul’s 

First Epistle to the Corinthians: Ye 

cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and 

the cup of devils: ye cannot partake 

of the table of the Lord, and of the table 

of devils. This is very extraordinary 
language ; what does it mean ? 


I 


The Apostle was thinking of the 
idol festivals which took place in 
Corinth, and of the foul immoralities 
which were so often associated with 
them. Apparently there were in the 
Corinthian Church those who, shelter- 
ing themselves behind the Apostle’s 
own conviction that no zdol 1s anything 
in the world, and that there is no God 
but one, thought that they might still, 


75 


The Guests of God 


Christians though they were, frequent 
the old heathen festivals and take no 
hurt. But the Apostle would not 
hear of it. When at the Lord’s Table, 
he says, we break the bread and drink 
the cup, we enter into communion 
with the Lord of the Table Himself. 
In like manner, to take part in the 
sacrifices of paganism is to be joined 
in the fellowship of demons; and, he 
adds, with sharp decisiveness, a man 
may do the one, or he may do the 
other, but he cannot do both: Ye 
cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and 
the cup of devils : ye cannot partake of the 
table of the Lord, and of the table of devils. 

To-day, when the science of Com- 
parative Religion has taught us to 
look upon the faiths of other peoples 
with a larger sympathy and charity 
than once was possible, some will be 
disposed to resent the uncompromising 
harshness of the Apostle’s language ; 
they will say that it is neither just 
nor true to speak of the old Greek 
religion as a religion of devils. It 
should be remembered, however, that, 
as Dr. Denney has pointed out, St. 
Paul is speaking of the ancient pagan- 


76 


Austerity of the Christian Life 


ism, not as a modern professor of the 
science of religion, but as a missionary ; 
not as it might be in theory and 
ideal, but as it actually was in the life 
of a gay, luxurious city like Corinth. 
Judging it from the same standpoint, 
Mr. Chesterton repeats and endorses 
the Apostle’s verdict. ‘‘The Early _ 
Church,” he says, in his recent book 
on St. Francis of Assisi, ‘‘ called the 
gods of paganism devils, and the 
Early Church was perfectly right. 
Whatever natural religion may have 
had to do with their beginnings, 
nothing but fiends now inhabited 
those hollow shrines.” And though 
it is not easy to understand the state 
of mind of those who will credit what 
is affirmed by St. Paul and Mr. 
Chesterton together, but not what is 
affirmed by St. Paul alone, the words 
just quoted may teach some to pause 
before they set aside the Apostle’s 
judgment as too sweeping and severe. 


IT 


But our immediate concern is with 
the meaning of St. Paul’s word for 


igs 


The Guests of God 


ourselves to-day. It is a reminder, 
always needed, of the austerity of the 
Christian life. There are things with 
which the religion of Jesus resolutely 
refuses to square, things with which 
it has no more concord than has the 
cup of the Lord with the cup of 
devils; and never is it more fitting 
that this radical and unalterable in- 
compatibility should be brought home 
to us than when we kneel at the Lord’s 
Table. 

This is not an aspect of the truth 
of which at the moment we care either 
to hear or to speak. Puritanism, 
with its restraints and inhibitions, is 
at a discount. We prefer to quote 
Augustine’s great saying, Dilige et 
quod vis fac—** Love and do what you 
like !>—and to emphasise the freedom 
of the gospel. But though this is a 
part of the truth, and a very large 
part, it is not the whole of it. Think 
what we will of Puritanism, there is a 
Puritan element in the New Testa- 
ment and in all true religion which 
we ignore or try to get rid of only at 
our peril. Do not let us play off love 
and law one against another, for 


78 


Austerity of the Christian Life 


though it is the law of love that we 
are under, it is none the less the law 
of love. The gospel, in St. Paul’s 
thought of it, was not only something 
to be believed, or received, or welcomed, 
it was something to be obeyed, and 
he speaks with great plainness of the 
consequences oi disobedience. In 
other words, the Christian salvation 
is a vocation as well as a gift. ‘‘ No 
man,’ says Dr. Carnegie Simpson, 
“can really open his mind and con- 
science to the tact of Christ without 
feeling that he ought to be a better 
man, and that, if he and Christ are 
to continue near each other, he must 
be a better man. His faults are 
named to him and his duties as never 
before.’” Whatever else Christianity 
means, it indubitably means this, and 
whenever men are in earnest about 
it, it is always so that their religion 
works. 

So did not I, said Nehemiah, because 
of the fear of God. That is to say, 
Nehemiah was a religious man, and 
because he was a religious man there 
were things which he could not do 
which others, in the same circum- 


79 


The Guests of God 


stances, might and would do without 
hesitation. “‘ You seem a very tem- 
perate people here,’ Mr. Augustine 
Birrell once said to a Cornish miner, 
“how did it happen?” The miner 
replied solemnly, raising his cap, 
** There came a man amongst us once, 
and his name was John Wesley.” 
Lord Morley pays a like tribute to 
Gladstone. After quoting from one 
of his great speeches in the House of 
Commons, in which he set forth his 
view of the temper and principles on 
which nations to-day should deal with 
one another, Morley adds this pregnant 
comment: ‘Mr. Gladstone was not 
a Christian for nothing.” To him, 
as to Nehemiah, religion did really 
mean something ; he, too, might have 
said, ‘‘ So did I—so did not I—because 
of the fear of God.” It is always 
so, I repeat, that real religion works, 
and the Christian who interprets his 
freedom as a freedom to go anywhere 
and to do anything that “ nature” 
prompts will quickly find St. Paul 
across his path with the blunt word of 
denial upon his lips: Ye cannot drink 
the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils. 
80 


Austerity of the Christian Ltfe 


IIL 


‘* St. Paul—yes,”’ some one may say, 
“but not Jesus. These harsh and 
unlovely austerities that would hedge 
in as with thorns our way through 
the garden of life—they do not grow 
in the sunnier, milder air of the 
Gospels.” But is this really so? Our 
modern quest of the historical Jesus 
has, it is true, shown us as never 
before the gaiety, the geniality, the 
winsomeness of the Man of Nazareth ; 
and it is well that we should be shown 
these things, for they are there, but 
there are other things besides these. 
‘** Jesus, Thy deeds were gentle, yet 
who hath spoken words so austere 
as Thine? Thou hast told us of utter 
separation, Thou hast shown us a 
place where the tear falls in vain.” 
Usually when Christians speak of the 
Cross, it is of His that they are think- 
ing; when He spoke of it, it was our 
cross, the cross that we must take 
up, that He meant. And has any one 
proclaimed with such solemn in- 
sistence as He did the need of the 

F 81 


The Guests of God 


sternest self-mastery, no matter what 
the price may be? If thy hand or thy 
foot causeth thee to stumble, cut at off 
and cast it from thee: it is good for 
thee to enter into life maimed or halt, 
rather than having two hands or two 
feet to be cast into the eternal fire. And 
if thine eye causeth thee to stumble, 
pluck it out and cast it from thee : at as 
good for thee to enter into life with one 
eye, rather than having two eyes to be 
cast into the hell of fire. That is not 
a word for every man; it is for him 
who needs it. It is not a plea for 
asceticism for its own sake, and as an 
end in itself. If it urges self-mutila- 
tion, it is only for the sake of self- 
preservation. “Jf thy hand causeth 
thee to stumble ’’—all hinges on that ; 
and of that each must judge for him- 
self, and none for his neighbour. As 
Dr. Maclaren puts it, every man must 
be his own doctor, and keep his own 
finger on his pulse, and watch the 
first sign of failure there. But when 
the need is manifest, then Christ’s 
word becomes as imperative, as 
urgent, as the angel’s summons to 
Lot: Escape for thy life; look not 
82 


Austerity of the Christian Life 


behind thee, neither stay thou in all the 
Plain; escape to the mountain, lest 
thou be consumed. There may seem 
something unworthy, unheroic, in this 
hasty flight; were it not better, we 
may ask, to stay and fight it out? 
Yet there are occasions—again, each 
must judge of them for himseli— 
when to flee is the one safe and wise 
and right thing to do, when to dodge 
temptation is better even than to fight 
it. There are places we may not visit, 
there are books we may not read, there 
are pictures we may not look at, there 
are thoughts we may not think. 
That others can do these things is 
nothing. If for us they are fuel to 
the flame of our lusts; if they mean 
something for which even Paul’s strong 
word is not too strong—that we should 
have communion with devils, then 
there is only one thing for it: Watch, 
pray that ye enter not into temptation. 
So, in our austerity, we may win 
our souls. 


83 


LAs 


" matty 1% i x 





ATARAXIA 





VIII. Ataraxia 2 an om 


TARAXIA is the title of a chapter 
in one of Dr. Rendel Harris’s 
delightful books of devotion. The 
Greek word used in the Fourth Gospel 
—Let not your heart be troubled—is, 
he says, a verb farasso (disturb), 
‘*from which we can at once form a 
noun, which shall express the state 
of disturbance (taraxia), and then, by 
prefixing the negative, we make the 
word Ataraxia, which expresses the 
undisturbed state.’ Ataraxia, then, 
is the name for that peaceful temper, 
that quietness of spirit, of which the 
farewell words of Jesus were so full. 
As Dr. Harris suggests, the word is 
much more musical than its long and 
clumsy English equivalent, ‘° undis- 
turbedness,’”’ and though at first it 
may sound a little foreign, he thinks 
we shall soon be at home with it and 
like to use it. 


87 


The Guests of God 


I 


First let us seek a fuller definition 
of Ataraxia. It is the more necessary 
to define it in that it is so readily 
counterfeited. It is not fatalism. 
Fatalism is resignation to fate, and 
fate, as Sir-George Adam Smith says, 
is simply omnipotence without char- 
acter. Fatalism, therefore, is ‘‘ the 
characterless condition to which belief 
in such a God reduces man.” That, 
certainly, is not the peace of which 
Jesus speaks. Nor is it mere im- 
perturbability, the stolid, bovine 
placidity, which is too dull of heart 
or too thick of skin to feel what 
others feel. ‘Two painters painted 
a picture to illustrate his conception 
of rest. The first chose for his scene 
a still, lone lake among the far-off 
mountains. The second threw on his 
canvas a thundering waterfall, with 
a fragile birch-tree bending over the 
foam ; at the fork of a branch, almost 
wet with the cataract’s spray, a robin 
sat on its nest.”’ This surely is the 
rest which Jesus desired for His 

88 


Ataraxia 


disciples—the rest not of death but 
of life, the peace not of exhaustion but 
of strength. And as Alaraxia is not 
the temper that cannot feel, so neither 
is it the stoicism that will not. 


In the fell clutch of circumstance 
T have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 


Henley’s little poem is now almost the 
Confession of Faith of the modern 
stoic; and, doubtless, an iron mood 
like that may bring a man peace of 
a sort; but, again, that is not the 
peace that Jesus promised. 

The Ataraxia of Jesus is perhaps 
best understood through concrete 
illustrations of it. We open that great 
book of the heart, the Hebrew Psalter, 
and we read : 


Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, 
For he shall never be moved ; 

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings ; 
His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. 


There is the record of some unknown 
soul’s experience with God. Behind 
that verse stands a man like ourselves, 
whom evil tidings could not make 


89 


The Guests of God 


afraid, who through his trust had 
found deliverance from his fears. It 
is a voice out of the dim past to tell 
us that Ataraxia, the peace of God, 
lies within the reach of harassed men 
and women like ourselves to-day. 
And how many of them have learned 
the holy secret modern Christian bio- 
graphy will tell. Here, for example, 
is the last entry in Bishop Hanning- 
ton’s pocket diary, written just before 
he was led out to death: ‘I can hear 
no news, but was held up by Psalm xxx 
which came with great power. A 
hyena howled near me last night, 
smelling a sick man, but I hope it is 
not to have me yet.’ That is not 
fatalism; it is not stoicism; it is 
Ataraxia—the quiet of a mind that 
is stayed on God. Of all the disciples 
of Jesus none, perhaps, have better 
understood His words in the Upper 
Room than the Quakers, and it is 
fitting that one of their number should 
have given us the name for the temper 
we are describing. To how many of 
us have their very faces spoken of 
that large upper chamber, whose 
windows open to the sunrising, and 


go 


Ataraxia 


whose name is Peace! But our best 
commentary on the word of Jesus 
is Jesus Himself. He is the great 
example of undisturbedness. Peace 
I leave with you; My peace I give 
unto you. My peace—and yet even 
as He spoke He could hear the blood- 
hounds on His track. Down in the 
dark street wicked men, with one of 
His own disciples among them, were 
plotting to take away His life; and 
yet He said, My peace. Gethsemane, 
Calvary, the grave lay immediately 
in front of Him; they were the next 
steps in the way; and He knew it; 
and yet still He said, My peace. And 
His will is that the peace that was 
His should be ours. 

Dr. Harris tells us of one whom he 
knew who carried on an active service 
for his Master in the busiest of all 
cities, and who chose for his tele- 
graphic address the words, ‘* Undis- 
turbed, London.” The phrase may 
remind us of what we are all so slow 
to believe, that the Ataraxia of Jesus 
is meant for men, and not merely for 
monks, for the home and the busy 
world, and not merely for the cloister. 


Or 


The Guests of God 


It is no delicate plant which will 
bloom only in the sheltered nooks of 
our rough world; it grows beside the 
dusty highway, and where it is blown 
upon by all the winds of heaven. 
Christ does not withdraw His servants 
from the world in order that they may 
abide in peace. Like Wordsworth’s 
water-lily, ‘‘ whose head floats on the 
tossing waves,’ and yet “lives and 
thrives’ because its root “is fixed in 
stable earth,’ so He would have men, 
there where their work is, abide in 
peace because they abide in Him. 


II 


Of the blessedness of this temper 
there is little need to speak. Wher- 
ever we see it, in the lives of others, 
or imaged in the peace of nature, it 
makes its appeal to us, and we wish 
it ours. 

Calm soul of all things! make it mine 
To feel, amid the city’s jar, 

That there abides a peace of thine 
Man did not make, and cannot mar. 


Ataraxia, too, is not without a cer- 
tain practical value which even “the 


Q2 


Ataraxia 


world’s coarse thumb and _ finger” 
know how to measure. Fret and fuss, 
like friction in machinery, mean 
wasted power, energy working to no 
end. It is the still, strong man, the 
man of faith, who comes to the top 
in a crisis, when they who are all fuss 
and fluster can do nothing but get in 
the way. When the tempest struck 
the ship which bore St. Paul to Rome, 
the most “ practical’? man on board 
was the man who talked with the 
angels and made his home in the 
Unseen. 

Let not your heart be troubled: but 
in a world like ours is such a peace 
within man’s reach? Two things 
must be remembered. (1) The word 
is Christ’s word. There are some 
who when they cry, Fear not, only 
move us to anger: thin, shallow souls, 
without eyes to see or hearts to feel, 
what should they know of the fears 
that rack and rend the soul? But 
Christ knew all; He drank of sorrow 
out of a full cup; His clear eyes read, 
His tender heart endured, the worst 
that life can do; yet still He said 
that men need not fear. Had He 


93 


The Guests of God 


not the right to speak, and shall we 
not believe Him ? 

(2) Let not your heart be troubled— 
believe in God—believe in Me: the 
three words must be held fast together. 
It is useless to say, Let not your heart 
be troubled, it is useless even for Christ 
to say it, if there is no more to be said. 
With death looking in at all our 
windows and breaking in at all our 
doors, how can we not be troubled ? 
We must believe in God. Yet there are 
times when even that is not enough. 
Believe in God ?—if we could, then 
indeed our fears would be quieted and 
all would be well. But it is just there 
that faith sometimes finds its hardest 
task: who, where, is He that we may 
believe in Him ? 

On the road Thy wheels are not, 
Nor on the sea Thy sail. 


One word remains: believe in Me. 
Faith’s last refuge is Jesus—last, but 
sure. The weakest believer can hang 
upon Him. “Other refuge have I 
none’’; and none other do we need ; 
** Thou, O Christ, art all I want.”’ 


94 


DOES GOD CARE? 





IX. Does God Care? or or 


i HAVE always thought,’ says 

Bishop Gore in the preface to 
his recent book, “ Belief in God,”’ 
“that the only very difficult dogma 
of the Church was the dogma that God 
is Love.’’ And in the pages which 
follow he refers more than once to the 
profound difficulties, so widely and 
so acutely felt to-day, in the way of 
receiving the comforting doctrine of 
the goodness of God. 


I 


It is true that something may be 
done in seeking to meet these diffi- 
culties even without the aid of the 
Christian revelation. As Dr. Gore 
Says, reason in us demands goodness 
in God. Perhaps the truth cannot 
be better put than in Dolly Winthrop’s 
simple creed: “It allays comes into 
my head when I’m sorry for folks, 


: 97 


The Guests of God 


and feel as I can’t do a power to help 
’em, not if I was to get up i the 
middle o’ the night—it comes into 
my head as Them above has got a 
deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve 
got—for I can’t be anyways better 
nor Them as made me.’ And the 
saying, simple and unconventional as 
it is, goes to the root of the matter. 
When we argue from that which is 
highest and best in ourselves to God, 
our argument may be very incomplete, 
but it is valid as far as it goes. The 
Maker may infinitely transcend His 
work; He cannot fall behind it. 


He that planted the ear, shall He not hear ? 
He that formed the eye, shall He not see ? 


And He that made the heart, shall He 
not love? We remember Browning’s 
great argument : 


Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s 
ultimate gift, 

That I doubt His own love can compete with 
it? Here, the parts shift ? 

Here, the creature surpass the Creator,—the 
end, what Began ? 

Wonld I fain in my impotent yearning do all 
for this man, 


98 


Does God Care? 
And dare doubt He alone shall not help him, 


who yet alone can ? 


Would I suffer far him that I ive 2 
So wouldst Thou—so wilt Thou. 


And this, too, is the logic of Jesus: 
If ye, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much 
more shall your Father which is im 
heaven give good things to them that 
ask Him. It is a deep, true instinct 
of the human heart that speaks here, 
and we may trust it. The something 
within that bids us believe in One 
above who is wiser and better than 
ourselves is a part of that witness to 
Himself which God has planted in 
the soul of man. 


IT 


And yet it may well be doubted if 
this faith unaided can keep its feet 
in face of the cruel facts of life. Look, 
for example, at the sufferings of the 
animal world. Many of us perhaps 
hardly think of them at all. Of those 
who do, some lose their heads and grow 
hysterical. But Dean Church—a man 


99 


The Guests of God 


as free from hysteria and as little 
likely to lose his head as any man— 
used to say that the condition of the 
lower animals gave him vertigo when- 
ever he thought of it. And Dr. Gore 
agrees with him. ‘“‘I confess,” he 
writes, ‘‘that the glint of pain in an 
animal’s eye remains, if not a valid 
argument against belief in God’s good- 
ness, yet, as often as my mind dwells 
on it, a source of unrelieved discom- 
fort.’? And when we turn to human 
life the problem deepens. Still from 
a thousand Calvarys the old cry goes 
up to the silent, unresponding heavens: 
My God, my God, why ? Why do 
little children suffer? Why is inno- 
cence made to bear the burden of the 
guilty ? Why is all our life so dark 
with griefs and graves ? 

There are, of course, many ways in 
which we may seek to blunt the sharp 
edge of the problem. We may remind 
ourselves of what the world might 
have been if sin had not entered in to 
mar the Divine purpose concerning 
it ; we may call to mind how much of 
what is best in life we owe to the shap- 
ing hands of pain and sorrow; we 

100 





Does God Care? 


may bring in another world to redress 
the balance of this, and say that the 
Divine love has eternity to work in; 
above all, perhaps, we may take to 
heart Butler's great and always 
needed reminder of our ignorance and 
of our unfitness to be the judge of 
the ways of God. Nevertheless, if 
this is all there is to be said, if faith 
has no other allies than these, it is 
hard to see how it can survive: the 
facts of life will thrust it down and 
trample it to death beneath their 
ruthless feet. Professor Huxley would 
have granted the force of some at 
least of the considerations just named ; 
but every one knows where they leit 
him. Indeed no man, perhaps, has 
ever faced more unflinchingly the 
remorseless logic of his own position : 
‘“T cannot see,” he told Kingsley, 
‘* one shadow or tittle of evidence that 
the great unknown underlying the 
phenomena of the universe stands to 
us in the relation of a Father—loves 
us and cares for us as Christianity 
asserts.” 


IOL 


The Guests of God 


Til 


Huxley could not see one shadow 
or tittle of evidence that God loves 
us and cares for us. Of course he 
could not; nor could we if we only 
looked where he looked. If we were 
shut up to Huxley’s facts we should be 
shut up to Huxley’s conclusions. Is 
it not time to drop our easy-going 
optimism that lightly takes for granted 
the love of God, as if it were the most 
obvious thing in the universe? The 
truth is that the doctrine of the 
Divine love needs nothing less than 
the whole strength of the Church’s 
faith in Christ to sustain it. Dr. 
Gore does indeed report that the 
estimate of nature as “a gladiator’s 
show,’ which was fashionable in 
Huxley’s day, has been greatly modi- 
fied by more recent science; that 
there is something more in the pic- 
ture than the struggle for existence. 
Nevertheless, enough still remains to 
challenge seriously our Christian faith. 
It must always be hard to discover 
absolute love in a world in which, as 

I02 


Does God Care ? 


one writer grimly puts it, “‘ everything 
is eternally eating everything else.” 
‘*O wide-embracing, wondrous Love,”’ 
Horatius Bonar taught us to sing, 


We read Thee in the sky above ; 
We read Thee in the earth below, 
In seas that swell and streams that flow. 


But we may well doubt if any man 
ever read the love of God there who 
had not first read it in the face of 
Jesus Christ. 

When we turn to the New Testa- 
ment we see at once what gave to its 
writers their assurance of the Divine 
love: it was what they had seen of 
God in Jesus. St. Peter speaks of 
those who through Him are believers in 
God. And for the Christian believer 
there is no other way. LBelief in a 
god of some sort or other we may 
have apart from Christ; but for the 
Christian belief Christ is the only 
foundation. It was certainly so, and 
only so, that St. Paul reached his 
doctrine of the love of God. It was 
not the brilliant guess of a great 
religious genius; it did not come to 
him by way of intuition; it was—we 

103 


The Guests of God 


must put it simply if we are to put 
it truly—God’s word about Himself, 
spoken by Himself, in Jesus Christ. 
It is surely significant that in the 
great passage in the eighth of Romans 
on the Divine love—a passage that 
thrills and awes us by its holy 
vehemence—the Apostle never speaks 
of “the love of God” simply: it is 
first the love of Christ, and then more 
fully the love of God which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord. And the reason is 
plain—apart from Christ there is no 
sure knowledge of the love of God. 
It is because God so loved that He 
gave, because He spared not His own 
Son, but delivered Him up for us all, 
because in the life and death of Jesus 
men have seen the infinite self-sacrifice 
of God Himself; therefore they have 
dared to believe in spite of all that 
God is love and love creation’s final 
law. They have seen that love in 
Jesus, and that has made them sure. 
Is it not well that we should re- 
member these things to-day ? In the 
stress that has come upon us through 
the application to our Gospels of 
modern methods of historical inquiry 
104 


Does God Care ? 


some are being tempted to say, “‘ Oh 
well, if the history must go, let it go. 
Why worry any more about miracles ? 
After all, the great Christian ideas 
remain, and it is by these that men 
live.’ Yes, but it was not merely the 
ideas of Jesus that made men sure of 
God: it was Jesus Himself. St. Paul 
believed in the love of God, not so 
much because Jesus talked about it 
or because He said, When ye pray, say 
Father, but because in Him he saw the 
Divine love in being, in Him was made 
manifest the love of God. It is in 
the Jesus of history, in Him of whom 
the Gospels tell us, who did many 
marvellous works, who died for our 
sins, who rose again from the dead, 
it is in Him that men have seen the 
Father; and it is worse than idle to 
tell us that we may let all this go, or 
hold it only with a slack hand, and 
still go on believing, as if nothing 
had happened, in the love and father- 
hood of God. I repeat, the only love 
of God of which we can be sure is 
the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord. Let that go, and the very 
grave is at our feet. 


105 





THE BESETTING GOD 


ee hte! 

rent SWAT AR y 

LW ee iA 
aera 


h 


jiu, 
i yy 
hae 


MAY 
eG i 





X. The Besetting God @ om 


HE one hundred and thirty-ninth 
Psalm is a psalm about God. 
Who wrote it no man knows, and it 
does not in the least matter. Its 
meaning and spiritual worth are wholly 
independent of its authorship. ‘The 
important thing for us is, this is how 
some unknown saint of old did come 
to think of God; this is what God 
was to him. And the majesty of his 
thought wedded to majestic speech 
—‘‘like perfect music unto noble 
words ”’—has set this psalm on high, 
even among ‘‘ the Praises of Israel.” 


I 


O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and known me. 

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine 
uprising, 

Thou understandest my thought afar off. 

Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, 

And art acquainted with all my ways. 

For there is not a word in my tongue, 

But, lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. 


10g 


The Guests of God 


Thou hast beset me behind and before, 

And laid Thine hand upon me. 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; 

It is high, I cannot attain unto it.—(Vv. 1-6.) 


It is usual, I believe, to say that 
the theme of these great verses is 
the Divine Omniscience. ‘‘ Nowhere,” 
writes Perowne, “‘ are the great attri- 
butes of God—His Omniscience, His 
Omnipotence, Omnipresence—set forth 
so strikingly as they are in this 
magnificent Psalm.” This is true; 
but it is, perhaps, the least part of the 
truth. ‘“‘ Omniscience’’ and the other 
big words are much used in catechisms 
and the definitions of theology, but 
they say very little to the average 
man. ‘he psalmist was not a philo- 
sopher, and in this psalm he is dealing, 
not with philosophical abstractions, 
but with personal experience; he is 
not shaping a definition of God, he is 
telling what God is to himself; what 
he gives us is not theology but religion. 
To put it in a single word, the sum of 
these verses is not so much, ‘“‘ God 
knows all things”’; it is rather, ‘‘ God 
knows me.” All our life, our down- 

110 


The Besetting God 


sitting and our uprising, our rest and 
our activities; all our speech; even 
the thoughts of our heart—all are 
known and understood, naked and 
laid open before the eyes of Him with 
whom we have to do; this is the truth 
before which the psalmist bows down 
hushed and awed. Yet he does not 
shrink from it ; rather he welcomes it. 
The text, Thou God seest me, which 
has so often been used to terrorise 
little children—as if God were a kind 
of super-detective!—has no terrors 
for him. He would not have it other- 
wise; he is glad to think that there is 
One in whose periect knowledge he 
can take refuge: 


How precious are Thy thoughts unto me, O God! 
When I awake, I am still with Thee ; 


and the psalm closes with a prayer 
that the Divine Searcher will go on 
with His work till all evil has been 
discovered and judged and cast out. 


II 


Whither shall I go from Thy spirit ? 
Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? 
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there: 


TEACas 


The Guests of God 


If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art 
there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 

And Thy right hand shall hold me. 

If I say, ‘‘ Surely the darkness shall screen me, 

And the light about shall be night,”’ 

Even the darkness hideth not from Thee, 

But the night shineth as the day : 

The darkness and the light are both alike to 
Thee.—(Vv. 7-12.) 


The unescapable God! We often 
speak of our besetting sins; this man 
remembers his besetting God. The 
word which he uses is used of a 
besieging army ; so, like a beleaguered 
city, the psalmist sees himself hemmed 
in on every side, and his besieger is 
God. And once more, be it noted, it 
is this thought that is the spring of 
all the psalmist’s joy. What the 
all-encompassing Presence was to 
Brother Lawrence, and to General 
Gordon within the walls of Khartoum 
—‘* my Koh-i-noor ’’—so is it to him. 
Whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? 
Go where he may he cannot; there 
is no getting away from God. And 
that is the psalmist’s hope. Sin, it is 
II2 


The Besetting God 


true, has always to be reckoned with ; 
but it is never a man’s whole environ- 
ment; God, too, is in it. There is a 
Power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness. “‘Of that great change,” 
R. L. Stevenson once wrote about 
some crisis in his life, ‘‘ which turned 
me from one whose business was to 
shirk into one whose business was to 
strive and persevere—it seems as 
though all that had been done by 
some one else. J was never conscious 
of a struggle, nor registered a vow, nor 
seemingly had anything personal to 
do with the matter. I came about 
like a well-handled ship. There stood 
at the whee! that unknown steersman 
whom we call God.”’ 

And thus, through all the changes 
and chances of our mortal life, we are 
beset by God. In the night of fear 
there shall Thy hand lead me; and in 
the deeper night that men call death, 
behold, Thou art there also. Listen to 
this quiet word of faith from one who 
was ‘‘to the margin come”: “I lie 
like a boat upon a quiet tide, drifting 
out to sea—the sea to which we must 
all drift. ... I have lived my little 

H II3 


The Guests of God 


life, and my heart goes out to all of 
every tribe and nation under the sun 
who are still in the body. I would 
tell them with my last breath that 
there is comfort to the end—that 
there is nothing worth fretting over 
or being heavy-hearted about; that 
the Father’s arm is strong, and that 
His heart is very wide.”’ 


Til 


The verses which follow (13-18) it 
is not necessary either to quote or 
to linger upon. The psalmist is still 
dwelling on the wonder of the Divine 
wisdom and power. Even before he 
was born the Divine hand was upon 
him; before he began to be all his 
days were ordered and ordained of 
God. Then, again, he passes into 
thanksgiving : 

I will give thanks unto Thee ; for I am fearfully 
and wonderfully made : 


Wond rful are Thy works ; 
And that my soul knoweth right well. 


Then come other verses which seem 
at first to mark a swift and strange 
descent : 

II4 


The Besetting God 


Oh that Thou wouldest slay the wicked, O God: 

Depart from me therefore, ye blood-thirsty 
men. 

For they speak against Thee wickedly, 

And Thine enemies take Thy name in vain. 

Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee ? 

And do not I loathe those that rise up against 
Thee ? 

I hate them with perfect hatred : 

I count them mine enemies.—(Vv. 19-22.) 


This is a harsh note that jars all our 
nerves—a discord in the else perfect 
music of the psalm. What is the 
meaning of the strange outburst? It 
is not really an intrusion, much as we 
may wish it were not here. The 
psalmist has been meditating upon 
God and the glory of the Divine Being. 
Then he turns his eyes to earth, and 
what does he see? Evil men, men 
of blood, men who hate God, who 
defy Him, and lift themselves up 
against Him. Mark, they are not his 
enemies, they are God’s; or, if they 
are his, they are his only because they 
are God’s; it is against Him they are 
risen up. With such men what terms 
can God make? He can make none; 
He can but smite till they be utterly 
destroyed. And it is the energy of 
II5 


The Guests of God 


this conviction that finds expression 
in the psalmist’s words. Of course 
they are not Christian words, and 
no Christian to-day would desire to 
make them his own. But they are 
not sheer, unmitigated savagery. Be- 
neath their fierceness there lives a 
truth which man forgets at his peril. 
Our God is no mere passive spectator 
of human life, and when men set them- 
selves to work all manner of unright- 
eousness, it is with Him, the Judge of 
all the earth, they have to make their 
reckoning. 

Nevertheless, we are thankful the 
psalm does not end on a note like that. 
These are the closing verses : 


Search me, O God, and know my heart : 
Try me, and know my thoughts : 
And see if there be any way of wickedness in me, 
And lead me in the way everlasting. 
(Vv. 23, 24.) 


And so the end of the psalm bends 

back to meet the beginning. Its 

opening word is, O Lord, Thow hast 

searched me, and known me; its clos- 

ing prayer, Search me, O God, and 

know my heart. The psalmist had 
116 


The Besetting God 


cast his eyes over the world; he had 
seen its wild and lawless men, and 
their wild and lawless ways, and he 
had rejoiced to know that God’s 
judgments are abroad; now he turns 
within, to his own heart, his own 
thoughts, his own sin. and he prays 
that the same God will search and try 
and judge him. How better can we 
close our re-reading of the psalm than 
by making the prayer our own ? 


117 





“THINGS PRESENT” 





ATM LSE ROSEN EL 4/8 Onin 


Ps E love of God which is in Christ 
Jesus our Lord—it is with this 
simple and memorable phrase that 
9;, Paul ends one of the most wonder- 
ful passages in all his Epistles. And 
in the verses which immediately pre- 
cede it he recounts a list of foes not 
one of which, he says, shall be able 
to separate us from that love: neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor princt- 
palities, nor things present, nor things 
to come, nor powers, nor height, nor 
depth, nor any other creature. One 
phrase in the list always catches and 
holds me whenever I read or hear it—- 
things present. 


I 
Things present—what exactly did 
Paul mean by the words? It is prob- 
ably vain to ask the question concern- 
ing either this or any other of the 
ib 


The Guests of God 


things which he names. All attempts 
to give them definiteness, as Dr. 
Denney says, are ‘‘remote from the 
seriousness and passion of the Apostle’s 
mind.” If he himself had been 
challenged on the matter he would 
probably have declined to answer, 
In the earlier chapters of the EKpistle 
he has been arguing; now he has left 
argument far behind; prose has 
passed into poetry, logic into song, 
song like the lark’s when it fills all 
heaven with its music. Winged words 
like these are not to be caught and 
_ prisoned within the narrow walls of 
the dictionary’s definitions, They are 
the lyric cry of a heart struggling to 
find speech in which to tell out its” 
assurance that nothing that God has 
made, whatever be its nature, shall 
be able to separate it from the Divine 
love which is manifest in Christ. 
And like all great poetry they have 
meanings wider than any that were ~ 
consciously present to the singer’s own 
mind. There is no need, therefore, 
to apologise for the use which I make 
of one of the Apostle’s phrases now. 


I22 


** Things Present” 


II 


Things present, the things that are 
about us, that hourly occupy eye and 
ear and hand and mind, “the daily 
round, the common task”’—is there 
not sometimes real peril lest these 
things separate us from the love of God 
which is in Christ Jesus our Lord? 
How they lord it over us, brooking 
no rivals, claiming all life for them- 
selves, and that not because they 
are the only or the all-important 
things, but just because they are there 
and always there! ‘“‘ Lament thou 
and grieve,’ writes Thomas a Kempis, 
“that thou art yet so carnal and 
worldly, so watchful over thy outward 
senses, so often entangled with many 
vain fancies, so much inclined to out- 
ward things, so negligent to things 
inward and spiritual; so quickly dis- 
tracted, so seldom wholly gathered 
into thyself.’ It is the good man’s 
way of warning us against the tyranny 
of the immediate, againstletting things, 
as we say, ‘“‘ get on top of us,” against 
suffering things present to rule over us. 

123 


The Guests of God 


In Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s volume 
on Lord Shaftesbury there is an ex- 
tract from his private diary which 
may well make busy men and women 
pause: “Am getting on in life,’ he 
wrote, “and must use, while it lasts, 
my remnant of intellect; powers, 
such as they were, weaken; and no 
wonder, for it is all expense and no 
income; all labour and no rest; all 
action and no study; all exhaustion 
and no supply. Not had time to read 
a single book, a single review.’’ I do 
not quote this in order to ‘lecture ” 
either Lord Shaftesbury or any one 
else; but is it not plain where such 
a path, if pursued, must lead 2 When 
exports have got so far ahead of 
imports, when life has become “all 
expense and no income,” what can 
the end be but bankruptcy? And 
that is the standing peril of the 
preacher, the tragedy of more lives 
and the secret of more barren 
ministries than one cares to think of. 
We preachers often warn men and 
women in our congregations against 
a too great absorption in what we 
call the “ world.” But have we not 


124 


“* Things Present ”’ 


our *‘ world’’ too—the world of books, 
and calls, and committees, and en- 
gagements—and may not this come 
between us and God just as surely as 
the business man’s world ? 


Tit 


I have referred in an earlier chapter 
to the privilege which has been mine 
of going through the private papers 
and letters of one of the busiest and 
most successful Christian workers of 
his generation. If any minister of 
the Church during recent years might 
have been thought to be in danger 
from things present it was Collier, of 
Manchester. But Collier knew his 
peril, and therein lay his safeguard. 
He was walking home one day 
with a younger preacher whose popu- 
lar gifts were beginning to attract 
large crowds: “I say, » he said, 
‘“have you ever thought of that text 
[he was quoting from memory], Great 
multitudes came together to hear. But 
He withdrew Himself in the deserts, 
and prayed’? ? It was a word of 
counsel to his companion; but it was 

125 





The Guests of God 


still more a word about himself and 
his own conscious need. The truth 
is, and little as those who only saw 
him at a distance ever guessed, 
Collier was something of a mystic; a 
‘ practical mystic,’’ indeed—to borrow 
Lord Rosebery’s happy phrase about 
Oliver Cromwell—but still a mystic. 
What Lord Morley said of Gladstone, 
that he “lived from a great depth of 
being,” was true also in its way of 
Collier. All his springs were in God. 
The full rushing stream of his daily 
activities was fed from the eternal 
hills. 


Evermore 
Prayer from a living source within the will, 
And beating up through all the bitter world, 
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, 
Kept him a living soul. 


The greatest hour in the day, some of 
his old fellow-workers have told me, 
was when he met them for prayer, 
morning by morning, at the Central 
Hall in Manchester. 


From the world of sin, and noise, 
And hurry, I withdraw. 


Withdraw—that for us is the difficult 
126 


‘“* Things Present ”’ 


but necessary thing; it is so easy to 
be busy, so hard to be “ wholly 
gathered’? into one’s self. Never- 
theless, we must do it; for our work’s 
sake, for our own soul’s sake, for every 
kind of sake, we must doit. We must 
learn to shut to the door, to be “‘ alone 
with the Alone,’ to push back the 
throng and press of things, to make 
a space about the soul wherein it may 
have room to think and pray and 
grow, that things present separate us 
not from the love of God which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord. 


127 





BURDEN OR BRIDGE? 





XII. Burden or Bridge? = or 


Wa George Eliot’s “ Life”’ was 
published, andthe world learned 
with what apparent suddenness and 
ease she had cast off her early religious 
faith, Hutton of the Spectator shrewdly 
observed: ‘‘To me the remarkable 
point is that George Eliot felt herself 
relieved of a burden rather than robbed 
of a great spiritual mainstay by the 
change.” And there are many to-day 
who, though they have no thought of 
doing as George Eliot did, yet interpret 
religion as a restraint rather than an 
inspiration, a burden rather than a 
bridge, something that they are carry- 
ing rather than something that can 
carry them. To Bunyan, coming to 
Christ meant, first of all, deliverance 
from a burden that had grown to be 
intolerable; but to them religion is 
only a new set of responsibilities, 
more things to be done, one item more 
in the heavy pack which life, the 
131 


The Guests of God 


ereat task-master, lays upon tired 
shoulders. But, obviously, if that is 
so, there must be something wrong in 
our thinking. Let us go back and 
learn, if we can, where we have taken 
the wrong turn. 


I 


There are some who make a burden 
out of the beliefs of the Church. 
Religion presents itself to them as a 
number of things to be believed— 
things about God, the Bible, the future, 
and so on. The creed is thought of 
as something imposed by the heavy 
hand of ecclesiastical authority, which 
the disciple, whether he will or no, 
must shoulder and carry. And im- 
patient youth, confronted, as it sup- 
poses, with a demand like that, jibs 
and wants to know why it should be 
expected to take upon its back this 
huge kit of doctrines. Who is re- 
sponsible for the misunderstanding— 
youth, or its teachers—we need not 
pause to inquire; but that it is a mis- 
understanding a little clear thinking 
will quickly show. 

132 


Burden or Bridge ? 


Go back to the time when Chris- 
tianity was a new thing in the world. 
What had the disciples who first 
believed in Jesus to do with the creeds ? 
Obviously nothing, for as yet there 
were none. The first Christians were 
confronted, not with doctrines about 
Jesus, but with Jesus Himself. The 
creeds came later, as they were bound 
to come, because man is a reasoning 
being who must try to account to 
himself for what he holds to be true. 
But what were they when they came ? 
They were not, and they were never 
meant to be, final statements of truth 
imposed by authority upon others ; 
they simply set forth, in the best 
terms that were then available, what 
those who framed them had found in 
Christ. What, then, should be our 
attitude to them? ‘The attitude of 
those who are at once debtors and 
free. We are debtors, and if we are 
wise we shall thankfully acknowledge 
our debt; we shall use the creeds to 
help us to see and find in Christ what 
men before us have seen and found 
in Him. But we are still free, as free 
as were the first disciples, to see Jesus 


133 


The Guests of God 


for ourselves, and to say in our own 
way what we have seen in Him. In 
the long run even the most ancient 
and venerable of the creeds have 
value for us only just in so far as we 
are able to re-discover in our own 
experience the truth of which they 
are the imperfect expression. Christ 
imposes no burdens of belief. The 
creed that is not the language of a 
living faith is only so much dead 
lumber, and it is mere childishness 
to imagine that we make ourselves 
pleasing to Him by carrying it about 
on our backs like the idols of Babylon 
which the prophet saw—‘‘ mere bag- 
gage-bales’’ on the backs of weary 
beasts. But if our creed is simply 
experience translated into speech, an 
attempt to find words for the biggest 
and the best thing that we know, all 
talk of a “burden” is beside the 
mark; it is the soul’s free, glad con- 
fession of faith, its adoring cry as it 
clasps the feet of Him in whom it 
has found its Lord and its God. 

There is a well-known and beautiful 
legend which tells how our great 
Christian chant, the “Te Deum,” 


134 


Burden or Bridge ? 


sprang by sudden inspiration to the 
lips of Ambrose and Augustine, at the 
baptism of the latter, in the Church 
of St. John at Milan. Ambrose began, 
‘“‘ We praise Thee, O God; we acknow- 
ledge Thee to be the Lord’’; and 
Augustine replied, “‘ All the earth 
doth worship Thee; the Father ever- 
lasting,’ and so on, antiphonally, to 
the end. It is only legend, of course, 
but it may serve to remind us of what 
we are so prone to forget, that what 
gives worth to a creed is not the 
logical definitions of the shaping in- 
tellect, but the spiritual experience 
which, as best it can, it is striving to 
express. A saying of Dr. Denney 
goes to the root of the whole matter: 
‘“The Church’s confession of faith 
should be sung, not signed.’’ Once 
more, therefore, let it be said that 
what Christianity sets before us is not 
first a creed, fashioned by another’s 
hands and imposed by another’s will, 
something that we must carry ; rather 
is it “‘a living and a lifting God.” 
First let us seek experience of Him in 
Christ ; after that, so much of a creed 
as we need will follow, and it will be 


135 


The Guests of God 


no burden on the back, but a song of 
redemption on the lips of the re- 
deemed. 


II 


The burden of belief is not the only 
burden which men are bearing in the 
name of religion. If to some it is a 
creed, to others it is a code; to them 
it speaks not so much of things to be 
believed as of things to be done; and 
the doing is of various kinds, both 
ritual and moral. Blessed, cries one 
of the psalmists, blessed be the Lord, 
who daily beareth our burden. But as 
one glances down the long line of 
religious history from the days of 
Jesus until now, how many there are 
who seem never even to have tasted 
that joy! ‘They are like a string of 
Swiss pack-horses, as one has seen 
them toiling and straining up some 
steep Alpine pass, under a blazing 
summer sun, and the tragedy of it is 
that their burdens are the burdens of 
their religion. Think of the Pharisees 
of Christ’s day, binding burdens heavy 
and grievous to be borne on men’s 

136 


Burden or Bridge ? 


hearts and consciences, a load that grew 
past all endurance, and doing it all 
in the name of religion. Think of 
the long and evil centuries through 
which the Roman Catholic ideal of 
saintliness was supreme; think of the 
figures that look down upon us from 
the walls of every picture-gallery in 
Europe, “* the thin, pale face, the eyes 
red with tears or weary with watching, 
the transparent hands, the wasted 
form’’; and then ask where are the 
joyous freedom and triumph which 
meet us on every page in the New 
Testament, and in which Jesus meant 
that all His disciples should share ? 
And even within Protestantism, and. 
among ourselves, the old tradition 
still lives on. John Brown, of Had- 
dington, has told us that in his youth 
before he had learned a more excellent 
way, he would make a vow to pray 
on some days three times, on others 
six times, and how when conscience 
upbraided him with neglect he would 
double or even triple the ordinary 
tale, in order to pay off his old debts— 
making his religion, as men have so 
often done, not a bridge but a burden. 


137 


The Guests of God 


“And, surely,” it may be urged, 
‘religion does lay its burdens upon 
us. Did not Jesus Himself, in the 
same breath in which He promised 
men rest, speak of His yoke and 
burden? Is not the symbol of His 
religion a cross which we must bear 
as well as*He?” This is true; but 
it is no contradiction of what is now 
being said. In religion, as in so many 
things, all depends at what end we 
begin, what things we put first. 
Interpret Christ’s religion in terms of 
religious observances, or aS a new 
punctiliousness about duty, and we 
make of it a merely magnified deca- 
logue, a refined and elaborated Juda- 
ism—the very thing that drove men 
like Paul and Martin Luther well-nigh 
to despair. It is not there that Christ 
would have us begin. Those who 
would be His disciples He confronts 
neither with a creed to be believed 
nor with a code to be obeyed, but 
with Himself: Come ye after Me; 
and love to Him ensures, as no com- 
mandments can do, creed and code 
alike. The question, therefore, we 
have all to ask (as George Adam 

138 


Burden or Bridge? 


Smith puts it in a memorable chapter 
of exposition) is not, “Can I carry 
this faith ? but, Can this faith carry 
me? Not, Can I afford to take up 
such and such opinions? but, Can I 
afford to travel at all without such a 
God? It is not a creed, but a living 
and a lifting God, who awaits our 
decision.”’ 


139 





LIVING BY THE FAITH OF 
OTHERS 





XIII, Living by the Faith of Others 


REACHERS are wont to insist 
on the importance of having a 
religion of one’s own. True religion, 
say they, can never be mere hear- 
say; it is a personal discovery, a 
first-hand experience, not something 
borrowed or inherited, but our own— 
won, if need be, with our own heart’s 
blood. Like the Samaritans, we too 
must be able to say, Now we belveve, 


not because of thy speaking: for we “fe 


have heard for ourselves, and know. 
And, of course, all this is very true 
and very important; but it is not the 
whole truth. Religion, it is said, 
must be our own, born of our own 
vision of God, the expression of our 
own consciousness of the goodness 
and mercy of God. But suppose the 
vision lost, and the consciousness 
numbed and paralysed by the hard 
and cruel facts of life; suppose there 
be no inward assurance of God, then 


143 


The Guests of God 


what can we do? We can do this: 
when we have no faith of our own by 
which we can live, we can live by 
the faith of others. If we cannot and 
dare not say, my Lord, and my God, 
at least we may say, the God of Abra- 
ham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the 
God of our Fathers. 


Trouble is near : 
For there is none to help. 
Why art Thou so far from helping me ? 
O my God, I cry in the day-time, but Thou 
answerest not ; 
And in the night season, but find no rest. 


It may have come even to that with 
us, but if, like the same psalmist, we 
can say : 


Our fathers trusted in Thee: | 
They trusted, and Thou didst deliver them. 
They cried unto Thee, and were delivered, 


then is our deliverance nearer than 
we think. The faith of others cannot, 
indeed, be any permanent substitute 
for our own, but if in doubt’s desperate 
hour we can hold on to it, like a broken 
spar from a shipwrecked vessel, it 
may keep us afloat till rescue come 
through the recovery of our own faith. 


144 


Living by the Faith of Others 


Let us try to understand how this 
may be. 


I 


And, first, it should be remembered 
that when we are asked in the venture 
of faith to commit ourselves to God, 
it is no untried experiment to which 
we are invited. We are not the first 
to believe in God: °“‘ We come unto 
our fathers’ God.” Religion has a 
past, and a very long past ; its records 
are in many lands and in many 
languages ; and sometimes in the sure 
certainties of yesterday we may find 
some solid ground amid the dubieties 
and questionings of to-day. 

This is the argument of the great 
eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. The writer is seeking to 
hearten men who were bowed down 
under many and sore trials, and he 
does it by unfolding before their eyes 
their nation’s roll of honour, the names 
of their holy dead who had endured 
as seeing Him who isinvisible. There- 
fore, he says, let us, seeing we are com- 
passed about with so great a cloud of 
witnesses, run with patience the race 


K 145 


The Guests of God 


that is set before us. In other words, 
he would have the wavering faith of 
the living strengthen itself in the faith 
of the dead. And for us to-day the 
exhortation has gained in force a 
hundredfold. The faith of the first 
believers was faith in an _ untried 
Christ.. No long and sacred history 
gave its sanction to their individual 
venture, and when the fires of their 
faith burned low there were no stored- 
up memories with which to replenish 
them. They could live only by their 
own faith. And the same is true 
to-day of Christian converts on the 
mission field. There is no appeal for 
them to the God of their fathers. 
Like soldiers who with no “ supports ”’ 
have pushed forward into the enemies’ 
lines and have only their own quick 
brains and strong right arms to trust 
to, so the young convert in India or 
China has only his own faith to fall 
back upon, with little aid from that 
of others. But we have meat to eat 
that they know not of ; we are upheld 
by unseen hands; angels of memory 
minister unto us. For behind us lie 
nearly two thousand years of Christian 
146 


Living by the Faith of Others 


history and experience. We can say, 
with a fulness of meaning that the 
psalmist never knew, O God, our fathers 
have told us what work Thou didst in 
their days, in the days of old: 


And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, 
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song, 
And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. 


II 


Do we make as much of these things 
as we might? In the emphasis which 
with good reason Protestantism has 
laid on the individual, we sometimes 
forget that religion has a corporate as 
well as an individual life. It is not 
simply a matter between the lonely 
soul and God—God’s mercy to me; 
the Christian has his place in a great 
society which reaches in one unbroken 
line through sixty generations : 


One family we dwell in Him, 
One Church, above, beneath. 


And in certain narrow and limited 
ways we all remember these things 
and profit by them. A son recalls 
his saintly mother—the Bible in which 


147 


The Guests of God 


she read, the faith which gave her 
life its quiet strength, and though 
neither may ever be to him what they 
were to her, yet for her sake he can 
never think of them save with rever- 
ence. A great man makes his boast 
in the Lord, and the mere example of 
his faith will sometimes avail to save 
multitudes from slipping their cables 
in the night of fear. In a hundred 
ways we live by each other’s faith and 
hold each other up. 

But the argument has a much wider 
reach than these simple illustrations 
may suggest. The Christian religion 
is not a thing of yesterday, it belongs 
to the ages and the generations; and 
while, of course, that is no sufficient 
reason for believing it true, it is a 
reason for not lightly setting it aside. 
Whatever has been long respected is 
probably respectable. A grey-headed 
truth has always claims upon our 
reverence. ‘‘ The God of our fathers ’”’ 
speaks always as one having authority. 
A Swiss guide will sometimes cut upon 
his alpenstock the names of the chief 
heights which he has climbed with its 
aid. And the faith which claims our 

148 


Living by the Faith of Others 


assent has in like fashion been put to 
the proof. It comes to us sealed 
within and without with the names 
of those who have tried and proved 
its power. We receive it at the hands 
of men who can say: That which we 
have heard, that which we have seen 
with our eyes, that which we beheld, 
and our hands handled, concerning the 
Word of life declare we unto you, that 
ye also may have fellowship with us. 
Again be it said, this can be no sub- 
stitute for our own faith, but it may 
be a mighty reinforcement of it. We 
may be driven and pushed by doubt 
until even our surest experiences begin 
to seem like idle phantoms of the 
brain; but when all around us we 
find men and women by the score 
who confirm our seeing and hearing 
by theirs, faith may lift up its head 
and laugh at its fears. There is a 
striking passage in one of James 
Smetham’s ‘‘ Letters,’? in which, after 
speaking of his own experience— 
‘“‘inwardly as great and as simple a 
fact as the facts of seeing and hearing ”’ 
—he goes on to say, “ And I have met 
with such scores and hundreds who 


149 


The Guests of God 


strike hands with me in life and death 
on these great matters that it is settled 
‘ without controversy ’ to me.” 


Our fathers trusted in Thee: 
They trusted, and Thou didst deliver them— 


when with full understanding we can 
say that, faith is on the way to its 
own claim and confession, My Lord 
and my God. 


it 


But the greatest helper of our faith 
is the faith of Jesus. We believe in 
God through Him, and not least 
through the example of His faith. 
The old translation of the Apostle’s 
great saying—the life which I now live 
in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son 
of God, who loved me, and gave Himself 
jor me—is, as we all now know, wholly 
inadequate. The Christian is not 
simply a sharer in Christ’s faith; he 
does not merely believe like Christ ; 
he believes in Christ. And yet the 
old translation has its truth: we do 
live by the faith of the Son of God. 
We run our race mindful not only of 
the great cloud of witnesses, but above 

150 


Living by the Faith of Others 


all of faith’s pioneer and _ perfecter, 
Jesus, who (as Westcott says) “ has 
Himself sustained the struggle which 
we bear.” How little we realise the 
strain that the Cross must have put 
upon His faith! “Jesus the Con- 
queror reigns,” we sing; but through 
what anguish of soul the Victor passed 
to His throne! Surely if to any man 
it is given by his faith to save his 
brother’s soul, that power is His who 
endured the Cross and despised the 
shame. 

There are always those for whom 
it is hard to repeat the old confessions 
of our faith and to mean them. They 
look up for God, but tears have made 
them blind. Then it may be one thing 
only will avail—looking unto Jesus. 
“IT believe in God—the Father— 
Almighty’: it was His faith even on 
the Cross; through Him it may be 
ours again to-day. 


151 


AVA MANS (Oh 
Hit Hi 


Hee rRNA 





“DEAD ERE HIS PRIME” 





ALIV. ‘* Dead ere his Prime”? = & 


Uk own hope was—the words are 
quoted from Moffatt’s transla- 
tion—that He would be the redeemer of 
Israel ; but He is dead, and that is three 
days ago! It was grief’s lament at 
a young man’s grave. He _ for 
whom they mourned was but thirty- 
three. How they had loved Him, 
and what great things they had 
hoped of Him! But death, like a 
killing frost, had touched the tender 
blossom, and it was gone: He is 
dead, dead at thirty-three, life’s work 
but just begun. 


I 


The present writer spent some hours 
lately in a room filled with the books 
of a brilliant young student who fell 
in the Great War. They spoke of 
work already done and of larger tasks 


155 


The Guests of God 


still to be attempted. Our hope was 
—but he is dead. On one of the walls 
of the room hung a portrait of F. W. 
Robertson in his pulpit—cut off at 
thirty-seven. It was a room to set 
one thinking, for there must be rooms 
like it in every corner of the land. 
Those who enter them and sit awhile 
in silence do not need to tell their 
thoughts; we know what they are 
thinking, we can almost hear the 
merciless hammering of the old ques- 
tions: So young, so young—why did 
God let him die? ‘“ Why all this 
carefully drop-by-drop store, precious 
beyond calculation, emptied on the 
ground ?’> When a man comes to 
his grave in a full age, as a shock of 
corn cometh vn in wits season, we do not 
murmur. 


But to yield our breath, 
Life’s purpose unfulfilled !—This 
is thy sting, O Death ! 


What can we say? Can anything be 
said ? Is there any healing for our 
grievous hurt? Or, must we simply 
steel our hearts to submit as best we 
may ? 

156 


** Dead ere his Prime’ 


One thing must be said quite plainly. 
In one of the novels of the war there 
is a picture of a telegraph boy whistling 
up the drive to a house. A woman 
at the window catches her breath. 
With trembling fingers she tears open 
the buff envelope and reads. ‘‘ There 
is no answer,’ she says. ‘“‘ Lady, you 
are right. There is no answer, no 
answer this side of the Great Divide.”’ 
And to many of our questions that 
is all we can say—there is no answer ; 
and they who think to help us with 
their cheap remedies and their much 
speaking are no true physicians. The 
problem which the unhealed wounds 
of war have thrust upon us is no new 
problem; the war intensified but 
did not create it: it does not date 
from August 1914; it is as old as 
sorrow and as thought. Of that 
aspect of it of which we are thinking 
at the moment—the mystery of the 
unfinished life—something may be 
said which, though of course it does 
not solve it, may help in some degree 
to reconcile us to it. 


157 


The Guests of God 


II 


The death on Calvary was a young 
man’s death : 


Not a golden hair was gray 
Upon His crucifixion day. 


And Mary was there, the helpless 
witness of it all. Joseph was dead, 
and it was natural that she should 
have expected that Jesus would be 
with her to the end. And now He, 
too, is taken—and taken so. What 
SO many are enduring to-day was 
Mary’s sorrow in Jerusalem nineteen 
hundred years ago. And was there 
no clinging to life on Christ’s own 
part? Healthy in body, pure in 
mind, the pulse of life beating strong 
within His veins, was it not natural 
that He should shrink from death ? 
Lo say this is not to give way to a 
false and feeble sentimentalism ; this 
is the impression which the story of 
the Gospels itself leaves upon our 
minds. The cry in the Garden, O 
My Father, of i be possible, let this 
158 


** Dead ere his Prime’? 


cup pass away from Me, was some- 
thing more than the recoil from pre- 
mature death; but surely that too 
was in it. And would not Jesus 
cling to life, would He not shrink 
from death, because of the oppor- 
tunity that longer life would give for 
doing His Father’s will among men ? 
In the story of the visit of the Greeks, 
on the eve of His Passion, the Evan- 
gelist lets us see how deeply their 
coming had stirred our Lord’s mind. 
May He not have had, as Dr. Stalker 
suggests, His dream of a mission 
beyond the narrow bounds of Palestine, 
unhampered by the petty jealousies 
and hates of the Jews? And then 
the vision was blotted out by the 
shadow of swift-coming death. Is it 
any wonder that He cried, Now is My 
soul troubled ; and what shall I say ? 
Father, save Me from this hour? But 
if for a moment He shrank, it was only 
for a moment: For this cause came I 
unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy 
name. And so He died—as our sons 
died—because necessity was laid upon 
Him and He could do no other. 

Per crucem ad lucem: from the 


159 


The Guests of God 


Cross ‘“‘ where the young Prince of 
Glory died,” light falls on the dark 
mystery which haunts and saddens 
so many lives to-day—the mystery of 
the unfinished life. “ But,” it may 
be asked, “‘ how can the Cross help 
us ? How does it soften our tragedy 
to be shown another and a greater ? 
That loss is common to the race; 
that Jesus Himself was no exception 
does not make our own less bitter— 
rather more. The death of Jesus, so 
far from being the solution of our 
problem, is rather the aggravation 
of it, its supreme example—another 
stone in the heaped-up sorrow and 
injustice of the world.” And, of 
course, if the story of the Cross were 
only a story of brutal wrong done to an 
innocent man, if death were the end, 
it would be vain indeed to turn for 
comfort there. But death was not 
the end. We hoped that tt was He 
which should redeem Israel—and He 
did redeem Israel; He is doing it 
every day, and doing it by that very 
Cross by which men thought they 
had silenced Him for ever. And if 
God could do this by Mary’s Son, 
160 


‘* Dead ere his Prime’”’ 


dead at thirty-three, may He not be 
able to make something, though we 
know not what or how, of these 
broken, unfinished lives of ours to-day ? 


Tit 


Perhaps in the long run we are 
saved only by hope—the hope of 
immortality. This is the hope we 
must seek steadfastly to renew within 
us. And next to the New Testament 
it is the great Christian poets who can 
help us most. We open ‘“ Lycidas,”’ 
for example. This is how Milton 
begins his lament : 


Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. 


But before the end lamentation is 
turned to triumph, all the stops in 
Milton’s great organ are out, and we 
hear him singing : 
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no _ 
more, 
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, 
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor ; 
So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, 
And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 
L 161 


The Guests of God 


And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled 
ore 

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky : 

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high 

Through the dear might of Him that walk’d 
the waves. 


Or we turn to “In Memoriam’”’—and 
it is good to see signs that the re- 
action against Tennyson has spent 
itself, and that the great poet is 
coming to his own again. His poem 
is the record of his own questionings 
when the grave had suddenly opened 
at his fees. For long he lay stunned 
and prostrate. Then slowly, and still 
staggering under his load, he fought 
his way through the mists of doubt 
and pain to peace and light, until he 
could say : 


those we call the dead 
Are breathers of an ampler day 
For ever nobler ends. 


But if this is to be our faith—and 
no lesser faith will meet our need— 
some of us must revise some of our 
conceptions of heaven and the future 
life. “‘ There is something singularly 
inane,’ Mr. R. H. Hutton once said, 


162 


** Dead ere his Prime’? 


“even un-English, in the ordinary 
idea which English believers in im- 
mortality so often seem to accept— 
that it will consist in mere rest and 
praise, a kind of happy trance.”? But 
surely the life of the future will not 
be “a mere contrast to the very best 
life of earth’’; rather will it be “a 
transfiguration of that very best life”? ; 
not a languid ecstasy, a paradise of 
inaction, but a state in which ‘the 
whole nature springs into a new 
vividness of activity.” 


Somewhere, surely, afar, 

In the sounding labour-house vast 
Of being, is practised that strength 
Zealous, beneficent, firm ! 


Yes, His servants serve Him—there as 
well as here. God will not take the 
tools from our hands just when we 
have learned how to handle them. 
We carry with us into the next world 
capacity as well as character, and we 
may trust the great Overseer to see 
that it does not go unused. The 
training in school, the university, or 
in commerce—it was not wasted; it 
was all part of the preparation for 
163 


The Guests of God 


the larger life and nobler service of 
eternity. If it were not so He would 
have told us. 

When Lady Frederick Cavendish 
saw Gladstone the first time after the 
terrible tidings had come of her 
husband’s murder in Phoenix Park, 
she said to him—and as Dean Church 
truly says, no Roman or Florentine 
lady ever said a more heroic thing— 
“Uncle William, you did right to 
send him to Ireland.” And we did 
right when we sent forth our sons to 
die. Some day, it may be, God will 
let us see, aS now we cannot see, how 
right we were. 


164 


“THE HOVERING ANGEL GIRT 
WITH GOLDEN WINGS” 





XV. “ The Hovering Angel Giri 
with Golden Wings” o& or 


OW we see not yet all things put 
under Him. The word is still 
true. ‘There are days in all our lives 
whén to the eyes of fear it seems to 
be the whole truth. But the writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews saw 
beyond the shadows: Now we see not 
yet all things put under Him. But we 
see Jesus. ‘This is the word of hope 
that Christmas brings to every Chris- 
tian heart; and this is the prayer 
with which to greet the sacred time: 


Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 
Draw forth the cheerful day from night : 
O Father, touch the east, and light 

The light that shone when Hope was born. 


I 


What a book of hope the Bible is! 
Look at the Old Testament. It is 
167 


The Guests of God 


the literature of a people who passed 
through the strangest vicissitudes, 
and whose varying fortunes are re- 
flected in the lights and shadows 
which chase each other so swiitly 
across the ancient page. Sometimes, 
so thick and sombre are the shadows, 
one wonders how the light can ever 
pierce them. But “the hovering 
angel girt with golden wings ”’ is never 
far away. The national hope lived 
on with a toughness and tenacity 
that no extreme of disaster could 
destroy, and that made, in one man’s 
eyes, the reading of his people's 
history one long lesson in hope: 
Whatsoever things were written afore- 
time were written for our learning, that 
through patience and through comfort 
of the scriptures we might have hope. 
In the New Testament hope has its 
place in the triad of the Christian 
graces. When an apostle gives thanks 
for his converts, he remembers their 
patience of hope as well as their work 
of faith and labour of love; when he 
prays for them, it is that they may 
abound in hope, in the power of the 
Holy Spirit. Hope is the Christian’s 
168 


“* The Hovering Angel” 


helmet in the day of battle; it is by 
hope he is saved. And to such a 
hope—a hope set on Him—all things 
are possible: We shall be like Him ; 
for we shall see Him even as He 1s. 
Nay, so magnificent is hope’s outlook 
that it anticipates the time when, 
in some unexplained way, the whole 
creation which now groaneth and 
travaileth in pain, itself also shall be 
delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the liberty of the glory of the children 
of God. As Dean Church says, the 
Bible is from first to last an unbroken 
persistent call to hope. 


II 


What is this hope of which the Bible 
is so full, and which Christianity has 
done so much to renew? It is not 
another name for self-deceit; it is 
not a faculty for seeing things other 
than as they are. 


Hope tells a flattering tale, 
Delusive, vain, and hollow. 


And there is a gay and facile op- 
timism that shuts its ears and eyes 


169 


The Guests of God 


to the harsh cries and ugly sounds of 
life, and dwells within a painted 
dream-world of its own; but that is 
not hope. Hope is not blind; it 
looks on life with eyes wide open. 
But hope sees not only the cloud, it 
sees the light under the cloud. It 
sees the broken altars of Jehovah, 
and the seven thousand that have not 
bowed the knee to Baal. It sees the 
beleaguered city and the mountain 
full of horses and chariots of fire 
round about Elisha, and it knows 
that they that be with us are more than 
they that be with them. We see not 
yet all things put under Him, hope 
cries, but we see Jesus. And it is the 
factor that all save hope forget that 
turns the tide of battle. 

Let us look back and see how often 
in the Church’s history the man of 
hope has been justified. In that 
rough, fierce world in which the Epistle 
to the Hebrews was written there can 
have been few frailer things in the 
eyes of men than the little Christian 
Church. What madness it must have 
seemed to match its feebleness against 
the might of Rome! Think of St. 

170 


““ The Hovering Angel” 


Paul entering one of the great cities 
of the Empire—Ephesus or Corinth 
or Philippi: “‘ Who could dream that 
this travel-stained man, going from 
one tent-maker’s door to another 
seeking for work, was carrying the 
future of the world beneath his robe ?”’ 
But the traveller himself never 
doubted. We see not yet all things 
put under Him—not yet: it is the 
word of a man who knows that he is 
on the winning side, and can wait. 
And so it proved: three centuries 
later, and great, proud Rome bowed 
her head before the Galilean con- 
queror. 

Or see, again, what happened in 
the fourth and fifth centuries when 
the fierce barbarians of the North 
overran the Empire—now, in name 
at least, a Christian empire—and 
threatened the very existence, not 
only of religion, but of all civilised 
order. Which in those wild and law- 
less days would have seemed the 
judgment of sober good sense—“ the 
despair which saw only the frightful 
mischief, or the bold hope which saw 
in the barbarians the seed of a great 


17I 


The Guests of God 


Christendom”? But again it is 
despair that would have been wrong ; 
it is hope that would have been right. 

Or turn to our own land in the 
eighteenth century. Once more it 
seemed as if faith were smitten to 
the ground never to rise again. Every 
one remembers Bishop Butler’s sombre 
Judgment in the first edition of the 
*‘ Analogy,” repeated fifteen years later, 
when he spoke of “‘ the general decay 
of religion in this nation, which,’’ he 
said, “is now observed by every one, 
and has been for some time the com- 
plaint of all serious persons.” And 
then one recalls with a thrill of wonder 
that these were the very years of the 
great Evangelical Revival. There are 
surely few stranger and more instruc- 
tive contrasts in Christian history 
than that of the grave and learned 
bishop in his palace, fearing for the 
very life of Christianity, while just 
outside his palace walls, had he but 
known it, all England was breaking 
into song, the glad, new song of 
salvation : 

On every side are gathered to Him 

The weary and burdened, the reprobate race. 

172 


** The Hovering Angel” 


Once more it is despair mourning 
over what seemed the black and 
barren earth that was wrong; it is 
hope rejoicing in the green promise 
of the spring that was right. 

And the secret of hope’s brave 
continuance is this: it will not leave 
out God. Having no hope and without 
God in the world: the one is but the 
obverse of the other. If God the sun 
is blotted out from the sky, hope the 
flower springs no more in the earth. 
We see not yet all things put under 
Him—hope itself must often say that, 
but hope always sees Jesus, and 
seeing Him it can look beyond the 
passing hour to the day when the last 
enemy shall be subdued and God 
shall be all in all. 


Thrice blessed is he to whom is given 
The instinct that can tell 

That God is on the field when He 
Is most invisible. 


This is the message of Advent, the 
gospel of the Incarnation: God is 
with us. Our way may be in dark- 
ness, God Himself may be invisible ; 
but we are not left to ourselves, 


173 


The Guests of God 


the Dayspring from on high hath 
visited us. 


IIT 


We sometimes speak of hope as one 
of the Christian graces; but we ought 
to keep in mind the contrast, which 
Dr. Denney has aptly pointed out, 
between these and the graces of the 
Greeks. The latter are beautiful, but 
their beauty is aesthetic, not spiritual. 
They are lovely as a group of statuary 
is lovely, but their nature is utterly 
unlike that of the three powers of 
the Christian character. ‘‘ The Greek 
graces are essentially beauties; but 
the Christian graces are essentially 
powers; they are new virtues, and 
forces which God has implanted in 
the soul that it may be able to do His 
work in the world.” And it is for 
us to cultivate and exercise these 
great powers of the soul. Let us learn 
to distrust even our own counsels 
when they spring from despondency. 
Wisdom comes with hope, for hope 
litts up our hearts to the unseen 
Helper who is always with us. 


174 


‘“ The Hovering Angel” 


For right is right, since God is God, 
And right the day must win ; 

To doubt would be disloyalty, 
To falter would be sin. 


With such a hope, though our way 
may be through the desert and the 
path stony and sore to our feet, by 
our side will run the sweet waters to 
which we may turn for refreshment 
and strength. 


175 





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ROA A Ie Bi 

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